¿Por qué los funerales son tan caros y quién es dueño de tu funeraria?

The funeral home in your town probably has a family name over the door — and there's a good chance that family doesn't own it anymore. Across North America, nearly fifteen hundred funeral homes belong to one company based in Houston, and most of them still carry their original local names. When consumer groups compared prices in twenty seventeen, that company's funeral homes charged close to fifty percent more for the same basic services. It also holds seventeen billion dollars in funeral and cemetery contracts that people have already signed — for deaths that haven't happened yet. Most of us shop for a funeral only a few times in our lives, in the worst week we'll ever have, with no time and no idea what anything should cost. That's exactly what makes it such a good business. This is the story of who's really behind the funeral home down the street — and how the money moves when nobody is in a position to ask questions.

Here's how the business is supposed to work. A funeral home is about as local as a company gets. For most of the last century, it was a family business: one building, one name, often handed down from parent to child for generations. Families chose a funeral home because their parents had used it, because it was close, or because they knew the director from church. The economics are unusual. A funeral home carries heavy fixed costs — a building with a chapel and viewing rooms, vehicles, and staff on call twenty-four hours a day — while its customers almost never compare prices. In twenty twenty-three, the National Funeral Directors Association put the median cost of a funeral with a viewing and burial at eight thousand three hundred dollars, before the cemetery plot and the headstone. With cremation instead, six thousand two hundred eighty. For most families, that's one of the largest bills they'll ever pay without shopping around first.

Now, the buyer. In nineteen sixty-two, a Houston funeral home owner named Robert Waltrip founded Service Corporation International — SCI. The playbook was simple: if funeral homes are local businesses with heavy fixed costs, buy several in the same city and share everything behind the scenes — the vehicles, the staff, the back office. And keep the name on the door. SCI's own annual report says it plainly: after an acquisition, the original names and their heritage generally remain the same. Decades of deals later, SCI operates fourteen hundred eighty-five funeral homes and five hundred cemeteries, across forty-four states, eight Canadian provinces, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, under a national brand most customers never notice: Dignity Memorial. In twenty thirteen it bought its biggest rival, Stewart Enterprises, for one point four billion dollars — after the FTC required it to sell fifty-three funeral homes and thirty-eight cemeteries in fifty-nine local markets. Even Frank E. Campbell, the Manhattan funeral chapel founded in eighteen ninety-eight and famous for celebrity funerals, is an SCI home. In twenty twenty-five, the company took in four point three billion dollars in revenue, and estimates its share of the North American funeral and cemetery market at about eighteen percent.

So does any of that change what families pay? Consumer groups have tried to find out. In twenty seventeen, the Consumer Federation of America and the Funeral Consumers Alliance surveyed a hundred thirty-eight funeral homes in nine metro areas. At the thirty-five SCI homes, the median price of a simple cremation was twenty-seven hundred dollars, compared with about fifteen hundred sixty at the others — about seventy percent more. A full-service funeral: about seventy-seven hundred, against roughly fifty-two hundred — forty-seven percent more. It's one survey, and it's nearly a decade old — but it remains the most direct published comparison. The same survey found that none of the SCI homes it checked posted prices on their websites. Two years later in California, where funeral homes must either post prices online or use a narrow opt-out, researchers found SCI homes made up most of the ones using the opt-out. When they asked thirty-three of them for price lists, two replied. By twenty twenty-three, three-quarters of the Dignity Memorial websites surveyed did post prices — but often, in the researchers' words, 'only a very determined or lucky consumer could find' them. And that matters, because a family arranging a funeral is the opposite of a normal customer: grieving, rushed, and worried that comparing prices might look like not caring.

There is a rule meant to protect those families. In nineteen sixty-three, journalist Jessica Mitford's bestseller, The American Way of Death, exposed how the industry upsold the grieving. In nineteen eighty-four, the Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule took effect, and it gives you real rights: a funeral home has to hand you an itemized price list in person, and tell you its prices over the phone if you ask. You can buy only the items you want. And you can bring a casket from somewhere else, without paying a handling fee. But the rule was written before the internet. It doesn't require a single price to be posted online — which is where most people now shop for almost everything. In twenty twenty-two, the FTC started the process to change that, and held a public workshop the following year. As of twenty twenty-six, no final rule has been issued. The biggest pricing gap in the industry is still open.

Now follow the money one step further — into the future. A big part of the funeral business isn't selling today's funerals. It's selling tomorrow's. A preneed contract lets you choose and pay for your own funeral, or a cemetery plot, years before you need it, often in installments. For the customer, it's peace of mind, and it can lock in today's prices. For the company, it's something more: a pipeline of guaranteed future business, and money that arrives long before the work does. Depending on the contract, the funeral money sits in a trust or pays for an insurance policy until the day it's needed. At the end of twenty twenty-five, SCI's backlog of unfulfilled preneed funeral and cemetery contracts stood at seventeen billion dollars — up from sixteen billion a year earlier. Its preneed funeral trust funds returned fourteen point seven percent that year. In other words, the largest funeral company in North America already knows where a huge share of its future revenue will come from — and many of those customers are still alive today.

SCI isn't the only buyer anymore. A twenty twenty-two investigation by KFF Health News counted about nineteen thousand funeral homes in the U.S. — at least eighty percent still privately owned and operated. But corporate chains own roughly one in five, and private-equity-backed firms own about a thousand. One of them, Foundation Partners Group, bought Angel Valley Funeral Home in Tucson in twenty nineteen. According to price lists collected by a local consumer advocate, a basic cremation there went from four hundred twenty-five dollars to seven hundred sixty after the sale. And the buyers are racing a shift in the business itself. The U.S. cremation rate was projected at sixty-three point four percent in twenty twenty-five — about double the burial rate. Cremation is cheaper, and SCI's own annual report warns that its average revenue for cremations is lower than for traditional burials. So the industry's answer is to sell more around the cremation: memorial services, urns, keepsakes, niches — and, again, prepaid plans.

So who comes out ahead? SCI's shareholders, clearly: in twenty twenty-five the company earned five hundred forty-two point six million dollars in net income on four point three billion in revenue. The private-equity firms buying up local funeral homes are betting on the same thing — steady demand, loyal customers, and very little price competition. Who pays? Families, at the one moment they're least able to push back — often without ever knowing the name on the door changed hands. None of this means the people at your local funeral home don't care. Most funeral directors, corporate or independent, do hard and important work. But the system is built around a customer who doesn't shop. So here's how to be one who does. Ask for the general price list — they have to give it to you. Call two or three funeral homes — they have to quote prices over the phone. Check who owns the place: on many websites, the corporate brand sits at the bottom of the page. And if you're signing a prepaid plan, ask exactly where the money goes, and what happens if you move or cancel. This industry runs on the assumption that nobody asks. Asking is free.

Next time on Margin, we follow the money into another business that counts on you never checking the bill. If you want to understand how money actually moves before the headlines catch up, subscribe — and follow the money.