it’s cheaper to die in the hood than the country club

sadly, i found out this is true…

…so, i’ve had a lot of car drama lately. we’ll get to that in another bit.

but while dealing with said drama in the rain over fifty miles from home in the dark the other night, i thought things could be worse, and at least i would get home, in my own car, safely. then things got worse, just not with the car – i got word that a good friend, and a great artist, had passed. at the time i’m writing this i still don’t know what happened.

what i do know is that his partner was suffering major sticker shock at the cost of taking care of things. it’s kind of ridiculous what they charge, and you know they do so because they CAN. there’s a huge fucking mark-up. of course, these conversations happen when you’re at your emotional worst, so its not like you’re really in the mental place to negotiate. they know this. and they take advantage of it.

oddly enough i had a semi-connection to the industry. another good friend’s mom had worked at a major austin funeral home that had been bought up by a national corporation for decades before she retired. i called her (i didn’t know she’d retired) and she put me in touch with a friend that was still there, and the conversation got interesting.

it turns out that the overhead at a funeral home is the key driver of price, and that didn’t change when they got bought. what DID change is where services (i.e. embalming, cremation, etc) is performed. instead of being done on site at the home, its done in a central location for said corporation, and then your loved one (or what’s left of em) gets transported to the home where you sit down, browsed some brochures, and wrote a sizeable check. but again, overhead varies per location.

what that boiled down to was that if you went to a less economically thriving part of town you’d see pricing way lower than some affluent neighborhood, even though when all was said and done granny’s hair and makeup were getting done at the same place. so what’s $10,000 in the nice spot might only be $6,000 in the not-as-nice spot, but it’d be the same quality. and in the case of my friend, the actual celebration of life was going to be somewhere he actually enjoyed life, not some funeral home, so this made total sense for that situation.

who knew?