A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that the monks who want to sell caskets in Louisiana can do so:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=14129584

I suspect I might well regret writing this blog simply because I had an attorney several weeks ago in New Orleans firmly and repeatedly remind me what I had writing in past blogs – in other words tossing my own words right back at me, and he was good at his job.

However I know that the lawyer’s job and stock in life is not easy or pleasant, and having been through the deposition process a few times I was not surprised or ruffled (much).  The young man was just doing his job.

This writing however is not really about the situation that popped up in the great state of Louisiana.  However to be fair to the reader, in a nutshell, here is what is happening way down South.  The religious monks are making caskets – I suspect really nice caskets simply because I have seen the monks' caskets in the past and most of them are skilled craftsmen. (I suspect that last comment will also come back to haunt me, but I will take the risk.)  Now here is the rub: There is a rule, regulation, some prohibition in the great state of Louisiana stating that only licensed funeral directors can sell caskets to the public.  The monks want to sell casket directly to the public, and the funeral directors stood up and said no.

The situation ended up in Federal Court – and as of this writing I have not heard what the learned judge has decided, and not being a betting man, I am just going to wait and see what decision comes down from the bench.

Throughout these proceedings however I was struck by this notion.  I can well remember days when people’s interest in funerals, caskets, vaults, monuments, anything basically to do with death, was extremely distasteful to the typical American who only crossed the death threshold when it was necessary.  It was clear that the general public did not want to talk about, face up to or interact much with the funeral service world, and to be sure caskets were an intrinsic part of the funeral world, and hence funeral directors, by public default almost, were the basic lone provider of the casket. This system worked for years, and some states (like Louisiana) even passed rules which were designed to keep the casket in the exclusive preview of licensed funeral directors, because funeral directors, with a law or without a law, historically have been the only people in any community who ever showed the least inkling of interest in the casket.

However in the past decade people seem to be coming out of the woodwork to get their piece of the overall funeral pie so to speak, and the casket is a very easy target to focus on.  The monks in Louisiana want to sell caskets and have been selling them to the public and I cannot speculate as to what is their motivation to do so, but then there are people right off the street who decide to sell caskets directly to the public, sell memorial books, sell vaults, sell most any death/funeral related “commodity” directly to the public.

Not surprisingly however I have not seen many of these “outsiders” wanting to take on the responsibility of caring for the actual dead body, and/or serving the bereaved family during and after the commemorative funeral rituals, and I totally understand why – because it is easier, pure and simple.
The logic of the ease goes this way.  If I can sell a casket between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. and make a nice profit, why should I even be concerned about getting out of bed at say 3:30 a.m. and respond to a death crisis?  No, my friends, the outside people who have put funeral service products on their financial radar screen want to be “funeral directors” without having to put in the time, education, mission and devotion to just do it right.

I suspect when my new lawyer friend reads this he will smile and his smile is probably justified and understandable given the sign of the times these days.  It is clear now to me that I am out of touch with exactly what it means in essence and substance to be a funeral professional these days.  There was a time that providing caskets was a part of the essence and substance of being a funeral professional.   Who are we now?  What now is our mission?  How do we respond kindly to the loss of something that clearly once was viewed as a “sacred burial receptacle” but today is very successfully being bantered around as a commodity rating about on level of importance with a refrigerator?  What do we do?

If as funeral directors we put up a protest, then naturally the response is that we are being greedy (as were some of the responses in Louisiana), and of course nothing is more archetypal in its offensiveness to the human experience than the stereotype of the greedy undertaker.  Even Charles Dickens portrayed the “greedy” undertaker in his novel when he invented the shylock London undertaker “Mordecai Mold.”  Of course, to be fair, I don’t think that the lawyer profession these days is doing much better when it comes to a positive public image, nor is the United States Congress – it is just a sign of the times.

I find that the only comfort I can get concerning this state of affairs in professional life is to talk to other mission-oriented professionals who have stayed the course, who have been educated, who have passed their required state and national examinations who have served their required internships, clerkships and apprenticeships, and who have GOTTTEN THEIR STATE LICENSE TO PRACTICE THEIR CHOOSEN PROFESSION and not circumvented the requirements that the rest of us had to successfully attain.  It gives me comfort to talk with these people who have stayed the course, because it places my sadness about the signs of the times in a better perspective.  Here is an example.  Following my trip to New Orleans for the deposition upon my return I spoke with a physician buddy of mine.  We both had gone to college in Boston at the same school and at the same time.  He is a mighty fine human being.

We sat in a bar, and I poured my soul out to him about my experience in New Orleans.  He patiently listened and then said a couple of comments that stuck with me.  One statement was “Well Todd, take heart, think what I feel like, after sixteen years in medical school and I get dressed down by some clerk at an insurance company.”  The next statement he made also struck me. He said:  “Our litigious society is eroding us by pieces, and we are so used to the lawyers just battling it out that we are numb to it, and personally I end up requiring needless medical test after needless medical test, just to cover my ass from being sued.”

There we are.  Insurance clerks are bossing around licensed physicians; purchase of pharmaceuticals can now be easily accomplished online without the assistance and expertise of a licensed pharmacist; and monks want to sell caskets.

I want to close by proving as best I can my opinion that there are now folks out in the world who are mighty interested in making money through funeral service, but are not in the least interested in actually doing the work.  In New Orleans I spontaneously in my deposition tossed out this question. “If the monks are interested in caskets, why don’t they just open up a licensed funeral home, I mean the Archdiocese of Denver did it a quarter of a century ago, and it is still in business.”  The looks I received made me feel foolish and that I must have had carrots growing out of my ears.  The message was clear – caskets yes, funeral service no.

In the end I feel that our rock solid foundation of funeral service is just that – service to other people.  The casket used to be part of that – but who knows what the future will hold concerning that issue? The profession is called “funeral service” not “funeral casket” and that is something that these days grounds me and gives me solid direction – service, service, service, service to others.

I drove home that evening, still sad that the monks and undertakers ended up in Federal Court, but thinking clearly after talking to my medical buddy “It could get worse.”  Only time will tell.  Anyway that is one old undertaker’s opinion.  TVB

“24/7 Wall Street” posted a piece on January 13 entitled “The Ten Companies that Control the Death Industry.”  http://247wallst.com/2011/01/13/the-ten-companies-that-control-the-death... The first surprise was that Wal-Mart, Amazon and 800-Flowers were all in the top 10 influencers….Discounters that wouldn’t even have been on the radar screen a decade ago. The rest of the article was same ‘ol,  same’ol at first blush.  The order that they were listed was kind of random.  The interesting stuff comes if you re-order them by industry sector.

They posted revenues and earnings for each.    All companies listed were publically traded. I left Wal-Mart, 1-800 Flowers and Amazon.com out as irrelevant for this comparison---death related revenue is such a small fraction of their revenue.   Net Income as a percent of revenue (Return on Revenue- below listed as ROR) provides a fair benchmark for comparisons of the 7 remaining true industry players.  So here are the results when you “Sector” order them:

Sector:   Manufacturing                                                                 ROR

        Rock of Ages (Granite Memorials)                                            13.9%
        Hillenbrand (Batesville Casket)                                                  9.4%
        Matthews (Bronze Memorials)                                                    8.0%

Interesting that three of the top four Return on Revenues are suppliers.   They always complain about skinny margins at the wholesale level and talk about how much better the margins are at the retail level, but manufacturing leads the way.

Rock of Ages has always enjoyed this snobby culture that was all about only providing the finest quality granite for a 50% premium. They refuse to compete on the low end.  Seems to be working for them, huh?

Sector:    Consolidators – Funeral Home and Cemetery

        StoneMor Partners: (Mostly cemetery and some combos)            8.8%
        Stewart Enterprises: (Cemeteries and combos)                          7.2%
        Carriage Services: (Funeral homes and some cemeteries)          3.9%
        Service Corporation International: (Mature consolidator –
            Mostly funeral homes)                                                         2.4%

It appears that the oldest and largest (SCI) of the consolidators with the highest percentages of funeral homes achieves the lowest return. The newest of the consolidators (StoneMor) are exclusively cemetery and combo with only a handful of free standing funeral homes.  It is the highest achiever.

Stewart is middle-aged (as opposed to mature) and prospers from their formula of mostly large cemeteries, with large combination funeral homes on their properties and few free-standing funeral homes. Carriage is mostly free-standing funeral homes and middle-aged as well.

Point Being: Top two are cemetery dominated. Bottom two are funeral home dominated.

Conclusion:

The 1990’s is often called the decade of consolidation, and funeral home companies were high flying in terms of returns, multiples and purchase prices, with cemeteries and suppliers just trying to stay alive.  What a difference a decade makes, huh?   The Tortoise seems to have beaten the Hare.

This week I received a message from a former student of mine who today is a success in our profession (no thanks to me having been his professor). His message caught my attention and once again I sat in my office asking myself questions about the state of the state of this great profession.

Here is the situation my former student encountered.  In one week two former casket company sales representatives and executives from two separate casket companies died and my former student received the call to serve both families.  I gleaned from his message that these two men had worked in the casket world for decades, and between the two many decades of work had taken place, and I was of the thinking that thousands of casket had been sold to funeral directors who in turn sold them to bereaved families.

Both casket representatives were immediately cremated.  No casket, no embalming, no flowers, and no nothing save for the incineration of the dead human remains, and an instruction from the descendents of both families concerning the disposition of the cremated remains.  There you have it in a nutshell, and this made me start thinking.

I have the firm conviction that it is anyone’s absolute right to choose what they want.  No question, I mean this is American – freedom reigns supreme.  The funeral profession and cemetery activities will not fold up because two former casket sales reps, or someone else for that matter, decided to do what anybody finally decides to do.  Options and alternatives are quite popular in our society today and the insightful funeral profession offers scads of options and alternative.  This decision concerning the two casket representatives is not the end of the world.  There are many more important issues confronting the human experience than what happened to two casket reps who sold caskets thousands of times.

However this situation just started my brain thinking again about the state of the state of this world of death that we all live in.  Here are some unanswered questions that I have, and as I always like to learn stuff about my profession, so I openly ask for anybody reading this to jump in the deep end of the pool and educate this old fat grumpy undertaker as to why these things continue to go on.   Remember these questions come from Todd, so don’t expect too much sophistication.

Here are some questions:

1.  Why would someone who has sold caskets for decades to hundreds of funeral directors upon their own death would not utilize a casket? 

2.  Why would a funeral director, who has conducted hundreds and in some cases thousands of funerals in their career, upon their own death not have a funeral?  I remember several times in my own limited career that some mighty prominent funeral directors died and nothing was done.  No ritual, no ceremony, nothing.  Why?  Does this not strike anyone else out there funeral land as something to question?  When a funeral director does not have a funeral for themselves what kind of a message is sent to the community that they have served faithfully for years?  Is it not an oxymoron, the funeral director might just not like funerals?

3.   Why it is less expensive to cremate a dead human body than to dig a grave usually? Crematories require thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment and facility investments, and cremation requires certifications, training and expensive on-going maintenance,  and has significant liability and is a time consuming procedure, and then the post cremation activities are involved and requires meticulous attention to detail, but yet to dig a hole in the ground with a mechanical digger, which takes much less time than to cremate, and if the grave, God forbid, is dug in the wrong place the error can be quickly corrected (an error in cremation cannot be corrected), and there seems to be no certification and formal training to dig a grave, so why does this cost more money than to cremate?, And if you die and want a burial on a week-end the cost can be ten times what a cremation costs to accomplish.   So here is my question: why is digging a grave so much more expensive than cremating a dead body?

4.   Why is it that embalming a dead human body is cheaper than digging a grave?  A dead human body was alive, lived life, and influenced others.  In some religions the human body is sacred.   Learning the art and science of embalming is not a snap.  It takes time, several years of college education, mentorship, internships, study, examinations (tons of them) skill, knowledge and expertise.  Embalming a dead human body appears to me to be ten times more intricate and requires ten times more skill and knowledge than it does to dig a hole in the ground, no matter how important that grave might be.  Why is this?

These are four questions that just baffle me, and I ask for and am extending the right arm of fellowship to any reader that can help me fill in the blanks concerning this stuff.  I am obviously missing something here, but then missing stuff happens to me all the time.

I am asking for insight, for education, for your thoughts out there in the funeral/cemetery world, and please don’t give a thought if your answers establish that the person (me) who generated these questions is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, many people have concluded that fact years ago.  Your thoughts, honest candid thoughts, are welcomed, and at my stage of life and career, well, folks, when you have been shot with seventeen arrows the eighteenth one does not hurt very much.  I hope to hear from many of you good folks.

TVB

 Just two weeks after Walmart debuted a selection of caskets online, the retailer has slashed prices by about $100 on steel models and nearly $300 on its priciest bronze model. Steel caskets now start at $895, while the bronze caskets sells for $2,895.

The company has also added a selection of cremation urns for pets and humans. The urns retail for under $215.

As with the caskets, the urns are only available online.

Check out the November issue of the Memorial Business Journal for more information as it becomes available.

Visit www.memorialbusinessjournal.com for updates to this story.

 When news started circulating on Oct. 20 that Walmart had begun selling caskets through its web site, many in the industry recalled Costco’s entry in the funeral service a few years ago. Although much was made of the foray at the outset, the numbers didn’t really cause funeral directors to lose sleep at night.

What Costco’s decision to sell funeral goods did do was to reinforce the notion that funeral service practitioners no longer had a corner on the product market. The handwriting was already on the wall by then as third party retailers started springing up with increased frequency.

Today, when a behemoth like Walmart starts working your side of the street, things could get interesting, with the obvious reaction being this will cause further downward pressure on retail casket prices.

“Walmart represents a bigger threat than Costco since they have so many nearby locations,” said David Nixon, president of Nixon Consulting, Chatham, Ill.  “Even though their caskets are only online, the retail power is the largest in the United States.”

“This is not an overnight cataclysm, but a slow, inexorable chipping away of pieces,” said Alan Creedy, president of Trust 100, Raleigh, N.C. He sees Walmart’s entry into funeral service as part of ongoing trend toward unbundling.

To meet the challenge from third-party sellers, funeral directors responded by raising service charges thereby lowering their casket margin dependence. However, as a whole, the profession is still not heavily tilted in that direction.

According to Nixon, it is the service charge that is the most frequently compared aspect of funeral service. Firms such as Everest Funeral Package offer consumers funeral price comparisons, primarily on the service charge. As a result, there can be downward pressure on the service charge as well.

Mark Allen, executive director of the Casket & Funeral Supply Association, sees Walmart’s entry into funeral service as a good news/bad news situation. “The good news is that Walmart, like Costco, is putting the option of choosing caskets — domestically-produced caskets — in front of buyers. The bad news is that mass marketing a limited number of styles based on low pricing encourages consumers to regard caskets as a commodity rather than as an important way to add meaning and personalization to the memorialization process. Plus, it offers consumers yet another opportunity to skip the funeral director when planning a funeral.”

Prices of the Walmart selections range from $999 (for 18-gauge steel) to $3,199 (for a bronze casket).

Another Angle Unfolding

While most of the attention has been directed at Walmart, another angle to this story is unfolding. Supplying the caskets, urns, jewelry, flowers, and pet memorialization items to Walmartis Star Legacy Funeral Network, McHenry, Ill. Founded in 2006, the company supplies funeral-related products to end users and also assists consumers with planning and preplanning funerals.

In addition to Walmart caskets, Star-Legacy currently supplies urns for Costco, and offers a wide range of funeral items for the Internet site Overstock.com.

Since 2007, Star Legacy has supplied funeral product as part of Walmart’s employee benefits program, which is separate from Walmart online. Through this program, Walmart employees are able to purchase funeral goods, including flowers, urns and caskets, just like life insurance is a benefit.

It is the vision of Rick Obadiah, Star Legacy president and CEO, to create a network of funeral homes as part of benefit program Star Legacy provides to major corporations such as Walmart.

“Our goal is to create a major benefits program that has within it, as one of its components, a directory of affiliated funeral homes,” Obadiah said. “Because of our contacts in the mass market, we will be able to bring customers to that network.”

Other principals in the company include Joe Semon, director of manufacturing and product development, who has been in funeral service for 43 years; Wes Johnson, director of information technology; and R.J. Grissoff, director of sales.

Michael Kubasak, a funeral director and long-time consultant and industry speaker, serves as a consultant for Star Legacy Funeral Network.

“Walmart employs a couple million [1.5 million] people and those people have deaths in their family,” Kubasak said. “A part of that network is going to suggest an affiliated funeral home to the employee. That is going to be the key ingredient for a funeral home to realize additional business [from the network] through exposure to many potential buyers. Plus there will be the assurance to the consumer that I am dealing the best funeral home in the area.”

A funeral director advocate for many years, is Kubasak concerned that his affiliation with Star Legacy will be interpreted as a sign he is now a competitor? “At present there may be funeral directors who see Star Legacy as a competitor,” Kubasak said, who has been consulting with the company for about a year.  “However, as I, and other industry consultants and experts have been saying for years, funeral directors must learn how to emphasize the service aspect and not look for the majority of their profitability merely from the sale of a casket.”

It is here where Obadiah and Kubasak are hoping funeral directors look at the overall plan and not just on the online casket sales aspect.

“For us, we look at funeral homes, everybody in the industry as our potential partners, whether they are funeral homes, urn suppliers or casket manufacturers,” Obadiah said, “And our customers are the end users. We don’t view a funeral home as a customer to buy our product, of course if they want to, they can. And that distinction is what differentiates us.”

Obadiah expects the specifics about the network to be rolled out to funeral homes no later than June 2010.

Kubasak added that if funeral directors walk away thinking that Walmart is going to cause them to lose a casket sale, they would be missing the most important point. The key word here, Kubasak said, is network. “In a very short period of time, the network is going to be in place,” he said. “It is the network portion that has to excite the funeral director. It’s a great way for an independent funeral home to get their name in front of a lot of potential purchasers in their marketplace.”

Reiterating a point Kubasak made at many a seminar, “anyone can supply a box. In addition to Costco and retail casket stores, we know of churches that build and provide caskets for their members,” he said. “It is evident that anyone can supply a casket, but very few people or companies have the skill, the ability to provide the sensitive, caring service when a death occurs. Few are willing to make the investment in a facility and fewer less have the expertise and the experience and the know-how that funeral practitioners possess in dealing with death and helping say goodbye — not just a typical funeral but to really help people say goodbye in a meaningful way that may be entirely different from my father’s or my grandfather’s idea about what a funeral should be.”

According to Obadiah, Star Legacy is the “manufacturer of record” for the caskets. Kubasak said that all of the metal caskets are manufactured in the United States. All of the wood caskets, at present, he added, are imported from Canada. He emphasized that Star Legacy caskets are not imported from China or Mexico.

Product is shipped from one of four warehouses (Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Tennessee) with locations in Texas and the Pacific Northwest expected to open by January 2010. “We have an arrangement with FedEx, because our goal is to be able to blanket the country with overnight delivery,” Obadiah said.

Look for a follow-up to this story in the November edition of the Memorial Business Journal

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Is there such as thing as trends in "casket fashion;" and if so, what's "hot" these days?

Significant cultural, personal and industrial trends and changes are redefining our society and they do impact funeral service. People in North America are getting larger; more and more families are asking that the funeral service be personalized; and the cremation rate continues to grow.

For the past several years, the number one new product request from customers has been for additions to our line of plus-size and oversize caskets, which we introduced a couple of years ago.

We had about 35 models between the two (plus-size caskets fit in a standard vault; oversized caskets require an oversized vault), and about a year ago we increased to more than 50. Funeral directors told us these families want personalization, too, so we added personalization options available on our regular caskets to some of the models in this line.

There is one interesting thing we have noticed for a number of years in terms of casket colors. We buy our paint from the same company that most auto manufacturers buy their paint from, and if a certain car color is popular, usually about three to five years later, that color becomes a popular choice for caskets.

Of course, we would probably never offer "spitfire red" as a standard casket color.

But I'd like that color!

Like so many other requests we get from customers for caskets painted in colors such as Harley Davidson orange or John Deere green, we would certainly be willing to make it for you in our custom shop.

Batesville's company history (on the Web site) mentions that at one point the company stopped making wood caskets entirely and then started making them again in the '70s. Was that in response to consumer demand?

That's correct. To recap, when Batesville Coffin Co. was acquired by the Hillenbrand Co. in 1906, it was making wood coffins, which evolved into wood caskets. In the '20s and '30s, we started dabbling in metal, and just before the war started, we found a manufacturing process that allowed us to produce metal caskets very cost-effectively.

During World War II, we stopped making both metal and wood caskets to save precious resources for the war effort. We were making a lot of the old cloth-covered cardboard caskets. After the war, we focused almost exclusively on metal caskets; in the' 50s and '60s we did not make wood caskets.

We resumed making them in the mid- '70s as a result of customer input. In fact, we now offer a complete line of wood caskets made using premium wood veneers and structurally sound engineered wood in addition to our solid wood casket line.

Have there been any product changes to appeal to particular religious or ethnic markets?

Just a few years ago, we got back into the business of manufacturing caskets for those of the Jewish faith. The caskets have to be manufactured in accordance with the tenents of their faith, including no work done on the Sabbath, no use of metal in the production and no use of glues containing animal fats.

Other religious and ethnic markets have expressed a desire for more personalization, and we have found we can address these requests with features such as tribute panels, including designs showing the Chinese symbols for long life and Our Lady of Guadalupe, as well as LifeSymbols designs, including the Our Lady of Guadalupe and Going Home themes.

As the spokesman for a casket company, what's your reaction to the "it's not about the box" mantra we hear so much these days at seminars and conventions?

It's never been about the casket. The focus of funerals (visitation, service, committal) is on the living and how, with the help of the funeral professional, the family can honor the life of someone who was loved.

And while it may not be about the casket, certainly the casket can and should play a pivotal role in the funeral. We try to build value into the products we offer so the family can feel good about selecting them, and the unique personalization options we offer can playa role in creating that meaningful funeral experience.

As I understand it, "it's not about the box" is repeated to funeral directors over and over because many of them in the past didn't charge enough for their services and tried to make up for it in the casket sale. As cremation rates rise, funeral directors must react by charging properly for their services. Casket manufacturers, for their part, are reacting by selling urns and other cremation products. Is the profit going to be the same for the manufacturers, though?  I guess Hillenbrand could focus more on its health-care products. How do you see casket companies responding realistically to the changing financial situation?

That's a very interesting question. I think part of the answer lies in the fact that we realized more than 12 years ago that cremation was not a fad, it was a growing trend, but the important thing we try to communicate is that with cremation, every element of the traditional funeral—a visitation, a service with the body present, a burial—can be the same.

We are doing everything to try to ensure that those elements remain, because we have a deep-seated belief that a meaningful funeral not only honors the life of the deceased but also takes the family along the first steps of the grieving process.

That's one of the reasons we value our relationship with Dr. Alan Wolfelt, who for years has said it's important that the family begin to mourn the death and celebrate the life, and that this happens through events such as the visitation and service.

I personally believe that without those elements you cannot effectively move through the grieving process. When you experience the death of a loved one, as I did several years ago when my father died, you see how the elements of a meaningful funeral help you and your family through the process.

What do you think about the funeral homes that have gotten rid of display rooms, showing the family products via catalogues or computers? Do you see that as a problem at all?

We do realize people are becoming more technologically focused, so we have almost a stair-step approach to help funeral directors determine what level of technology they want in the funeral home.

The first step is replacing the binder of product photographs with digital images updated every six months that can be downloaded onto the funeral home's computers.

The next step up is Batesville setting up and hosting (for a fee) a Web site that gives the funeral home an Internet presence and shows families the caskets available at the funeral home.

The third step is a kiosk that allows families to not only select the casket they want but also digitally "assemble" it with personalization options to see a picture of how it will look.

The pinnacle of what we have available electronically or technologically is our planning software the funeral director can use in making arrangements. It handles the front-end work, including printing death certificates, and at the back end can connect with an accounting package.

So do you think you offer enough different ways for people to view your product that people saying, "I'm getting rid of the casket room" is not a problem?

If they so choose to replace it, that's certainly their right, though we like to think funeral directors will use these systems to complement the display room.

We have always suggested, back when the movement to use cut casket displays came along, that funeral directors have a full-sized casket on site, if for no other reason than a casket is something families don't select every day—or every year. People select a casket every 12 to 15 years, and they need to see it to appreciate the craftsmanship involved and how our personalization features work.

If you want to have fewer full-sized caskets so you can show more casket personalization options and how they can work together—to give the consumer more information—that's great.

So you see value in keeping at least some full-sized caskets on display?

That may be more of a Joe Weigel perspective than a Batesville Casket perspective. But given the fact that caskets aren't selected as frequently as other consumer goods, consumers need to see a full sized casket, especially to really understand and value some of the features we offer.

What led to Batesville's touring display room?

That's our Honoring Lives Tour Center. I can't tell you the number of times we've had funeral directors from small, independent firms come to Indiana to learn what's new, walk in the door and get a cell phone call saying the mayor's died or something else has happened that requires them to get back to their businesses right away.

So we said, "If we can't bring them to Batesville, let's bring Batesville to them." We've been delighted with the response. Not just funeral directors but entire funeral home staffs, as well as mortuary school students—who usually get a special tour at night—have toured the traveling display.

So the tour will be continuing?

Absolutely.

What about the competition to North American casket makers from manufacturers in other countries, particularly the Chinese?

It's certainly no secret that casket manufacturing is no longer limited to just North America. We continue to heed the advice that John Hillenbrand gave his son, John A. Hillenbrand, shortly after acquiring the Batesville Coffin Co. in 1906:

"Concentrate on serving your customers first. You will have the greatest chance for long-term success if you build your business on a philosophy of mutual trust with your customers."

Do you think the Chinese casket companies present a big threat to American casket companies?

I can't speak for the other casket companies, but what I can tell you is we strongly believe that there are several factors that make Batesville an important part of many funeral home operations. We build a quality casket with innovative, patented personalization features they can get nowhere else and, just as important; we have a distribution system that's one of our crown jewels.

I know of no profession more time sensitive than the funeral profession, whether at the funeral home or the cemetery.

What do you see ahead in the casket market?

The PR director at Batesville may not be the best person to predict the future of the casket market. I'm sure there are other people in funeral service who can also shed some light in this area.

What I can tell you, though, is I'm firmly convinced that funeral directors and cemeterians will continue to play a very important role in the funeral process and that we stand prepared to help them create meaningful funerals for loved ones.

However fast the cremation rate rises, we plan on being a very important part of the funeral profession moving forward.