Posted on 09/08/2009 7:03:19 PM PDT by VRWCmember
BOSTON – Facing impending layoffs at his manufacturing plant, Alan Willoughby left to seek financial security selling automobiles at a used-car lot. Then the economy hit the skids, and he struggled to make ends meet. Finally, he turned to the one field he knew would provide him a steady income: funeral sciences.
At the age of 50, Willoughby is returning to college, joining a surge in student interest at the nation's schools that provide an education in the business and science of death, a field that historically garners greater interest as the job market worsens.
"It just got to the point where your big players, your Honeywells, your DuPonts, everybody was laying off. So I said, 'I can't do this anymore. It's just too much of a roller-coaster ride...'" said Willoughby, of Dinwiddie, Va. "Funeral services, for lack of a better phrase, it's kind of a recession-proof industry."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I’d never be caught dead working in the funeral science field
Perfect time to get into that field, with government health care looming on the horizon.
There used to be a cliche that you had such bad luck, that if you went into the funeral business people would stop dying.
You nailed it.
Some puns just write themselves. ;-)
I read from the LA Times, in the past year, about 700 families could not afford to claim the bodies of their loved ones due to the bad economy. Funeral is not cheap no doubt. Anyway, these poor souls just let the county coroner do the cremation, then claim the ashes back within 2 years, for $250.
Curiously, the only revenue stream that newspapers across the Country can still count on is for those “In Memorium” obituary pieces that they publish every day. For some people that’s the only nice thing anyone has had to say about them for decades, and families still insist on seeing that nice written memorial for Old Auntie Bulah.
Out here a basic memorial ad will run you several hundred dollars (up front and in case, of course) and the really big 1/2 pagers can run into thousands, depending on how many pictures you want...
Bizarre requests - one of his early "clients" was an elderly Greek jeweler, who had been henpecked by his domineering wife his whole life. His directive was to be cremated, then have his ashes spread over his wife's white living room carpet!
My oldest nephew is considering going into the business. He's finding there isn't much demand for non-liberal high-school teachers.
The undertakers’ societies (unions by a nicer name) have a dead hand (ha) in the high rates paid by much of the hoi polloi. In many places, it’s not permitted to bring your own coffin. By contrast, in some more enlightened environs, a funeral director can have visitation and funeral done in a church instead of a funeral parlor, which makes things a lot cheaper.
/johnny
I just saw a guy in a pickup with a coffin on the back, parked outside the crematory in town.
For many years now, there has been an effort to overthrow the undertakers cabal by those who want to create a more realistic and reasonable funerary service.
But for many decades the cabal has been inflexible, and willing to heavily lobby State legislatures to restrict the business to just the practices they want. Things such as mandatory embalming, with rare exceptions, like Orthodox Jews; requiring coffins for cremations, and practices like overcharging at every opportunity happen far too often.
Personally, I like the idea of using insects to reduce cadavers to just clean bones, which are much easier to dispose, allow for the recovery of artificial parts, and does not waste ground or fuel. The whole process would just take a few weeks, then the bones could be sanitized, then interred, ground up, or incinerated easily.
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