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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t this someone has to do? Making profits are not a bad thing. It’s a prerequisite for sustainable, growing business that provides better services over time. Unfortunately, quality of the services provided has to correspond to payment received. If you are running a hospital , you are segregating patients into different rooms depending on money you get. This is not acceptable in education so we have government run those but does funeral services be government run? If no, then making profits is necessary and someone needs to do it.

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Death services tread a very fine moral line. You're working with people who usually have no idea what they're doing, who are in a time of crisis in their lives, and who are trying to fulfill the wishes of someone who is now dead and can't provide any input.

There's a very fine line between providing someone services that will help them reach closure, and selling someone nostalgic snake oil so you have a few more dollars than you did yesterday.

It's not something I would get involved in. I feel like the only two ways it could go for me would be either compartmentalizing and becoming a greedy monster, or not compartmentalizing and becoming totally swallowed up by the sorrow I'm exposed to every day. Many kudos to the people that can be around that sorrow, be unaffected and yet still not become a monster.

Someone does, but not a a growth at all costs VC-backed startup.

While fictional, HBO's Six Feet Under touches on this.

Thomas Lynch wrote a book that I remember as interesting as far as I read it, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393334876 .

Not everything has to happen via the medium of commerce or government. Funerals are something that is ideally suited to being a communal effort, or it would be if communal living weren't dying off.

Wishing that a service should be provided by a community instead of a business does not address the fact that it is a service, and one which has a constant demand and an inherent need to be offloaded to a third party.

Once specialization is demanded from the service, the "communal" label becomes meaningless.

It /did/ used to be provided by communities. Funerals are traditionally handled by the church, an arrangement which seemed to work for a long time and doesn't contain the dilemma of impersonal and potentially exploitative interactions that entail commercial transactions. Communities have specialisations too. Unfortunately the community seems to be dying with the secularisation of society which only leaves government and business to tackle things.

> Funerals are traditionally handled by the church,

You're somehow assuming that a religious organization does not operate as a corporation, even down to the invoices.

Charging money does not make something a corporation. Though I'm aware of the financialised nature of some American churches, I'm talking from a British perspective where that isn't the case (as far as I am aware, I don't personally attend church).

Either way, I don't think there's as much moral hazard if you're charging someone at cost as part of a communal service, compared to trying to squeeze as much profit as possible out of grieving families.

> Charging money does not make something a corporation.

In your opinion, other than the different taxation schemes, what's the difference between a religious organization and a corporation?

Specially if both types or org charge to provide the exact same service.

if you mean some televangelist megachurch then sure, they're basically the same thing.

I was thinking of local parishes, which have historically existed as a communal centre and hub of support for a community.

I genuinely don't understand how you'd think that enlisting a professional service versus your local community to deal with a bereavement would not be different? That's like saying that the only difference between paying somebody to be your friend versus having a legitimate friend is only different because money changed hands?

Even when the church holds the funeral - often at no charge if its a member of the church who has died, and for a small suggested donation for others - a funeral director handles the body. And that costs thousands and thousands of dollars. My Dad's church funeral cost NZ$15,000 and the church would have seen less than NZ$1,000 of that.

That's a tremendous amount of money. I'm sure the church bringing in professional services to handle funerals is a more modern innovation too. The ideal in my head is that it would be entirely handled by the community - I presume this ideal existed in the past, though I'm not sure how far back you'd have to go per-locality. In the UK where I live, churchgoers also are typically buried by a funeral director, so I'm not talking about something that still exists AFAIK.

Also, I'm sorry for your loss.

Pushing overpriced useless junk to emotionally vulnerable people? No. There is a necessary service of digging a hole and putting a corpse in a box into it, but the whole business of $10k coffins and embalming and such is both unnecessary and quite unique to the US.

Expensive funerals are far from "unique to the US". The US spends substantially less as a proportion of income than Japan, China, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, and New Zealand, and is within a couple percent of a half dozen other countries.

[1] https://businesstech.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/S...

Ha, I think the internet needs a new term like Godwin's Rule or Gell-Mann Amnesia or whatever for the constant claims of "This only happens in America" or "This problem is worse in America than anywhere else" and then the reality is that the US is in line with averages or norms in other countries or cultures.

Anything that's a cheap way to get midwit upvotes is an unsolvable problem as far as I can tell.

Can we also have one for "Europe does X better" where Europe really just means France, Scandinavia the wealthy half of Germany, and maybe UK, and not the more irreputable countries like Belarus or Serbia?

I did look this up and found slightly different numbers:

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/how-much-d...

https://nfda.org/news/statistics

But I would maintain that the invasive practice of embalming is unnecessary and unusual elsewhere in the world.

I think those are consistent with the numbers I found

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