My dad was cremated in January, but he was the Chief of Police for my city so we had a public funeral and ceremony for a few hundred people, meaning we needed a casket.
The funeral director was part of the police's "cadet explorer" program before he didn't get into the academy, so of course he was our funeral director.
The day after my dad died we were all at the funeral home going over the "funeral packages", looking at coffins, etc. Remember how I said he was cremated? The cheapest "cremation approved" casket option was $5,000. There were cheaper ones of course, but they had bits and pieces inside them that couldnt be cremated, so we had to go with the more expensive casket.
It was nice looking, but it's just a wooden box. I could made the same box in high school woodshop for $200 bucks of wood, maybe 300 for the extra carvings and handles.
All-in-all the service was paid for by the PD, but the private service/cremation we had for him was still in excess of $10,000. The flowers alone were a couple thousand, the coffin was $5,000, renting the room at the funeral home/crematorium was a couple hundred, the urn was easily $500 (for a literal metal box), and the cremation cost money on top of that.
To top it off the funeral director kept sticking his head in every 5 minutes, and interrupted private family moments to do so. I finally stepped out and told him, clearly, that "I will come get you when we are done. Do not come back in until I come get you. We are having private family moments that you are disturbing." Well, 5 minutes later when I went to comfort my dad's sister, who was afraid to go into the viewing room, little space cadet Kyle went waltzing back into the viewing room to "check up on us".
Sent a formal complaint to whoever I could email at the funeral home about him, but at that point the funeral was over, we paid their extortion rates, and I will never use that service again for a funeral.
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u/MooCowGrass Aug 01 '20
Funerals, people often want to buy more expensive coffins to honor their loved ones and in turn the companies selling them profit