With Issues No. 10 through 15 of the FTC’s Funeral Rule notice, the agency begins inquiries on how to ensure the online shopper has access to all of the funeral home’s price lists before making any selections. Would it be sufficient to require the funeral home’s website to provide links for downloading the GPL (and
funeral rule
The FTC’s Seven Areas of Concern: Funeral Rule Revisions
By Bill Stalter on
Posted in Compliance, Consumer Advocates
As discussed in our prior post, the FTC’s rulemaking notice for amending the Funeral Rule requests public comment on 40 Issues. Those 40 issues are grouped by the FTC in the following 7 categories of potential amendments:
- Electronic price disclosure – whether and how funeral providers should be required to display or distribute price information
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FTC’s “Forty Issues” and the Funeral Rule Comment Period: Time to Get Serious
By Bill Stalter on
By a posting made November 1, the Federal Trade Commission gave formal notice of its intent to revise the Funeral Rule and opened a 60 day comment period. The notice is quite lengthy and signals that that the FTC wants major revisions to the Funeral Rule that go well beyond whether to require the posting…
NPR’s Stories on the Funeral Industry: On Line Shopping
By Bill Stalter on
NPR’s second story on the funeral industry suggests that preplanning a funeral will typically require visits to multiple funeral homes.
NPR led their story with a consumer attorney sharing his frustrations with getting price information from funeral homes near his father. To the attorney’s surprise, many of the funeral homes did not include general price…
Competing Mortuaries and Cemeteries: when everyone loses
By Bill Stalter on
Posted in Cemeteries
Mortuary Management recently ran a short editorial criticizing cemeteries, stating “we can only conclude that cemeteries will, in the long run, be the losers”, and “it may be time for a reevaluation of standards and staunch principles of the past”. The editorial is nothing more than a handful of comments from anonymous funeral directors about…
KC Funeral Consumer Alliance: Cemetery Survey
By Bill Stalter on
The funeral industry may grumble about the FTC’s Funeral Rule, but two disclosures required by that law play important roles in the preneed transaction. The general price list is often used by funeral homes as a tool for comparing prices with the competition. And when a prearranged funeral is performed, the statement of goods and services…
Competing for Cremations: How low can I go?
By Bill Stalter on
Posted in Cremation
Blame it on the economy, or on ‘unfavorable secular trends’, but as cremation rates continue to rise, operators need to consider their General Price List and their non-declinable basic service fee. In many parts of the country, competition has driven the price of the direct cremation far below the charge that the funeral home requires…