Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here in the United States, the cost of a traditional funeral is between eight thousand and ten thousand dollars on average, and that doesn't include the price of the burial plot and other cemetery fees. A casket alone runs two thousand, five hundred dollars on average, making it the biggest single expense of saying goodbye to
a loved one. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of caskets has skyrocketed two over the past thirty years, outpacing the inflation rate for other consumer products by more than double So why exactly do caskets cost so much? Is it simply the cost of materials or our funeral homes taking advantage of grieving customers who aren't emotionally prepared to shop around. What many people don't know is that they don't have to buy a casket from
their funeral home. It's a federal law that funeral homes must accept all outside caskets, including ones they are bought online or from Costco for example. Before the article. This episode is based on how Stuff Works. Spoke with both a second generation funeral home director and the co founders of an online casket company aiming to disrupt the funeral industry. Douglas Dutch Knee is the CEO and funeral director at Knee Family Funeral Home and Cremation Services in ann Arbor, Michigan.
Knee and his six sisters grew up in a home above the family business, and he and his wife purchased the funeral home from N's parents in the year two thousand and These own kids work there now too. When it comes to the price of a casket, Nie says that there are a lot of variables, which is why he says he can offer families a no frills casket for as low as nine hundred dollars to a high
end casket that runs six thousand or more. The biggest differentiator is the material with which the casket is built. There are two main types of casket material, wood and metal. Nie explained, with a wood casket, you can equate it to furniture. A ma hagany, hickory, or walnut casket is going to cost far more than pine or oak. For metal caskets, the US expensive models are made of twin e gauge steel, while the pricest are constructed from semi
precious metals like copper or bronze. For both wood and metal caskets, the quality and details of the craftsmanship rounded corners instead of welded, for example, will also determine the price. And then there are other considerations like the material inside the casket. A crape interior is going to be less expensive than velvet. For military burial, the family might want to customize the interior with an army or Navy seal.
All of this upgrades and details can add up. Knee insists that despite the high average cost of a casket, most funeral homes carry a range of caskets to meet the budget of everyone in their community to make sure that they have something for everyone. But there could be
other reasons why caskets have gotten so expensive. Josh Siegel and Scott Ginsburg are co founders of Titan Casket, an online casket retailer, and they argue that an outdated business model they call it big Casket, is to blame for the high price of most funeral home casket. It turns out the two large manufacturers, Batesville and Matthews, control of the casket distribution in the US, as Siegel said, they
exclusively selled the funeral homes. Because of that structure, they mark up their caskets three and that casket monopoly is only one part of the problem, the Titan guys argue. The other part is opportunistic markup. Ginsburg said, for the most part, consumers in these situations don't shop. They go to the same funeral home they've always gone to. It's not right or wrong, it's just what people do. And funeral directors understand people don't shop, which is why they
and charged twice as much for the same casket. And many Americans don't know that you have the right to supply your own casket for a loved one's funeral. The Federal Trade Commission enacted the Funeral Rule, which aimed to bring greater transparency to funeral pricing. The rule also made it illegal for a funeral home to refuse to handle a casket the client purchased from a third party retailer,
which now includes online sales. A lot of grieving families simply aren't interested in shopping around for a better deal on a casket, and that's understandable. That's one of the reasons why that of caskets were still purchased through funeral homes as of twenty nineteen, but companies like Titan think that if consumers knew how easy it was to buy a casket online and potentially a lot less expensive, then people would buy more caskets outside of the funeral home.
Ni who is a past president of the Michigan Funeral Directors Association and is currently an at large board member of the National Funeral Directors Association, and says that funeral homes are happy to comply with the FTC's funeral rule a quote, families can choose to purchase something online and there's not an issue at all. Our business model is to provide services to families, and the casket is just one of the items that can be chosen to ensure
that the services conducted the way a family wants. Besides, n points out fewer people are choosing a traditional burial anymore. According to report, the cremation rate of Americans was around fifty that year, and by traditional burial is expected to drop to just of all funerals. With cremation, the body is placed in an inexpensive plywood or cardboard container that is also consumed in the fire. By the way, have
you ever wondered why undertakers are called undertakers? Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the first undertakers were furniture makers who started building caskets as a sideline. They got their name by being the people undertaking the burial. Today's episode is based on the article Grave Matters Why are Caskets so Expensive? On housetof works dot com, written by Dave Rubs. The brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot com, and
it's produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts to my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.