Wednesday, October 15, 2003

By Frank Reeves, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

It would be easy to mistake the display room at Beinhauer's sprawling funeral home in Peters for a home furnishing store.

	With families so scattered, a funeral for a departed parent is sometimes the only occasion when all the children are gathered in one place, said Scott Beinhauer, who helps manage the funeral home that's been in his family for six generations. (John Beale, Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image.

Customers walk through glass doors into retail space that is suffused with light. Glass shelves are filled with urns and vases, ranging in size from a keepsake urn that sells for $25 to a "Double-lotus" urn for the final repose of a couple's ashes that can cost up to $2,000. There are card racks with greetings for every occasion, from birthdays to anniversaries to the death of a pet. There are books on grief counseling.

There's even a large-screen TV featuring a specially produced video recalling the significant moments in a decesased person's life. On 24 hours notice, Beinhauer's can prepare a video tribute, using cherished photographs, to be played at the visitation and taken home after the funeral. On the wall, a half-dozen headstones are displayed.

Call it the "Home Depot" approach to funerals where the everything the funeral home is selling is right there in plain view.

Gone are the old-style, often poorly lit basement casket rooms, filled with full-sized open caskets. Instead, customers are taken to display rooms that remind one of Pier 1 or the Pottery Barn, freeing them to pick and choose from an array of funereal accouterments.

"We are a nation of shoppers," said Bob O'Connor, vice president for marketing for York Merchandising Systems, whose parent company, Pittsburgh-based Matthews International Corp., helped pioneer the new sales techniques.

Customers like the familiar retail environment where they can browse and pick out the merchandise without a sales person -- in this case a funeral director -- hovering over their shoulder, he said. "People prefer to feel in control, especially on such a terrible day," he said.

At Beinhauer's, the display room has no full-sized caskets. Rather, there are 28 partial caskets and six cremation containers, all cut down to one-eighth their size.

The room reminds one of a kitchen remodeling display at big box home store, where sample cabinets are displayed under bright overhead lights.

The partial caskets are arranged by type -- metal caskets on one wall, wooden ones on another -- and by cost. Caskets can range in price from $2,000 to $8,000, depending on whether the casket is made of poplar veneer or mahogany or whether one desires a steel or solid bronze casket.

Underneath each is a drawer, which contains a picture of the casket as it looks full-sized and open. There is also a sample of the material that is used to line it.

The cremation containers vary in price from $300 to $2,000. For $1,000, a customer can rent a coffin for viewing before the cremation.

The use of scaled-down models "lessens the emotional trauma of walking into a casket room," said Doug Ober, executive director of the Doody Group, which in the 1990s helped pioneer the new marketing techniques.

O'Connor said the new marketing techniques ultimately improve customer satisfaction. The funeral home can simply show the products to the family, leave the room and let them decide. It also allows funeral directors to offer customers a wider selection of products.

O'Connor said it would be a mistake to look at the merchandising "in a vacuum. It's part of the wider services that funeral homes offer."

The York group, also a subsidiary of Matthews, pioneered the mass market approach through its trademark "York Merchandising Systems," which is featured in dozens of funeral homes across the country, including Beinhauer's in Peters.

YMS, as its known in the trade, is the brainchild of a marketing professor and entrepreneur, Alton F. Doody. Doody first got interested in the funeral business in the 1980s, working with the nation's largest casket manufacturer, the Batesville Casket Co., on ways to spruce up funeral homes.

Many of the homes were dreary and somber, with maroon carpet and dark-wood paneled walls, recalled Ober. They got funeral directors to put in more lighting, paint the walls bright colors. "There should never be any dark spaces in a funeral home -- never leave a door ajar that leads into a darkened room," he would advise.

The new marketing techniques have arisen as another trend has taken hold -- the desire by many, especially aging baby-boomers, for personalized funerals, what many call "celebrations of life."

The marketing techniques have drawn mixed reviews.

"Personalization is the latest buzz word that big funeral chains are banking on to sell high-priced merchandise and services -- especially engraved casket lids, golfing doodads for the casket, and headrests embroidered with your choice of poetry," Consumer Reports noted two years ago in a survey of pre-paid funeral plans.

Jeffrey Inman, a marketing professor at the Joseph Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, said that although the techniques make sense from a merchandising point of view, they do pose a risk for funeral takers.

"Undertakers should not forget this is a solemn, emotional time for most people. They must be careful not to be too cavalier. They should show respect for the situation," he said.

Harriet Menzer of the Pittsburgh Memorial Society, a nonprofit organization that encourages low-cost funerals, said she is concerned that the merchandising techniques will encourage people to spend too much on burials and cremations "when the money could be better spent elsewhere."

Correction/Clarification: (Published Oct.16, 2003) The Pittsburgh Memorial Society was misidentified as the Pittsburgh Funeral Society in a story in yesterday's editions about funeral home merchandising.

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