I’m all good with pre-planning your own funeral, but this is going to the extreme: Remember Coffin Academy, the self-help retreat in South Korea that lets you simulate your own death to be born into a new life? Nightline reporter Clarissa Ward went through the controversial seminar, which has participants write their wills, imagine saying [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Pre-need’
11 Feb
Funeral Industry – Is Your Pre-Need Person Well Prepared?
Many times, in the funeral homes I deal with, the pre-need sales person is totally unprepared. They themselves sometimes don’t even know it. They go into a clients home and they think they are making arrangements and showing the family everything the firm has to offer. When in all truth the material they have is [...]
1 Dec
State Warns Consumers of Prepaid Funeral Scams
Five years after Florence Muto prepaid for a funeral in 2004, the 92-year-old from Westland is out the $6,000 she paid for the plan. Muto was part of a group of 60 families authorities say were scammed by the owners of the now-closed Ziomek Funeral Home in Livonia between 1998 and 2007. Problems with prepaid [...]
5 Nov
Hey Walmart, Selling Caskets Online Is Nothing New!
Walmart is not reinventing the wheel. Selling caskets online is nothing new. Companies have being doing it for years. Of course, no one else is as big as Walmart though. Besides the fact that Walmart is huge and has a client base of over 300 million people, the casket game is kinda stacked against them. [...]
16 Oct
Funeral Home Operators Charged… Stealing From Preneed
LIVONIA, Mich. — Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced Wednesday charges against two funeral home operators. Christopher and Nancy Ziomek, both 54 years old and from Canton Township, are accused of taking money for prepaid funerals at their Livonia funeral home on Wayne Road and putting it to personal use. Each has been charged with [...]
9 Oct
SCI Funeral Director Charged With Corpse Abuse
HOUSTON (KTRK) — A former funeral director is accused of a deeply disturbing crime. The district attorney says authorities uncovered shocking photos of him and a dead body. While the pictures were allegedly taken several years before James Patton started working at Earthman Funeral Home, this latest incident of alleged corpse abuse may have happened [...]
9 Oct
Pre-Planning, Doing it right, Finally
Graham Murphy’s cell phone is ringing.It’s inventory time at JA Snow Funeral Home and the number of caskets and urns isn’t adding up. “Sorry about that,” he says, hanging up with well-whaddya-gonna-do? expression. Murphy is the general manager at JA Snow, Halifax’s oldest undertaker, now owned by Alderwoods Group Canada, Canada’s second-largest funeral home operator. [...]
5 Oct
Australian Funeral Directors Getting Bad Name Because of Amateurs?
IT IS the $1 billion-a-year industry where business is guaranteed never to dry up. But scratch beneath the compassionate mission statements and carefully worded slogans used by those in the lucrative funeral industry and a troubling state of affairs becomes apparent. And it is those within the industry exposing the problems, ranging from a complete [...]
30 Sep
Funeral Home Hosts Weddings, Parties
SOLON – One of the oldest, most well-known types of businesses is trying to reinvent itself. It’s normally thought of as recession-proof. Now, owners are turning a place typically filled with sorrow into a scenic, social center. One of the most popular places to host an event in Solon sits right next to a cemetery. [...]
29 Sep
Former Funeral Director Charged For Rotting Bodies
COLUMBIA, Mo.: A former Missouri funeral home director accused of keeping rotting bodies in a basement faces three felony counts of unlawful merchandising practices. The indictment that Boone County grand jurors returned Friday stems from allegations that Harold Warren Sr. knowingly gave families cremated remains that were not the ashes of their loved ones. Prosecutors [...]
