Funeral Words

Web Stores?

Just curious, anyone out there taken a look at selling products or services through your website? I have begun sorting through the details of setting up the details of our web store and find a dozen questions at almost every click.

For instance, we do not collect sales tax on funeral goods and services in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. However, with a web store providing remembrance goods and other items for the general public, all of a sudden I have to worry about collecting and submitting sales tax. For me this also means setting up a new company to house the project so that we can clearly segregate the taxable sales.

I have also just started looking at the transaction processing side of things. The web store built into our site has about 18 different methods of collecting payment using various formats and clearing houses with a variety of rates and requirements. So far as I know, I cannot reference a comprehensive review of the clearing options. So what do I choose? In other words I have lots of research ahead.

I wonder about the accounting processes we will need to adopt in clearing transactions and verifying sales. They did not teach such things at Mount Ida College when I attended 16 years ago.

I also wonder about the complexity of fulfillment on a small scale. What does it take to keep boxes and lables and such on hand in order to handle orders which come in from other parts of the country. We in funeral service tend to know lots about our immediate communities, not necessarily so much about running what amounts to a small mail order catalog.

Lots to think about. We need some seminars in our industry to start addressing these things.

BT

UK Searchers--Feedback Please!!!

As I watch the referral pages into this website, I see LOTS of clicks coming in from one or other of the UK search engines. Obviously I have the right website name for something people need in the UK, and I would try my best to fill the need, if I only knew what it was you wanted to find at funeralwords.com.

Will a few of you take the time to leave me a comment or drop me an email and let me know what you were hoping to find here??? If for instance you need samples of eulogies or funeral service related quotes and anecdotes or scripture quotations or any of a million other things; I will do my best to accommodate.

Thanks and have a fantastic day,

BT

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky

Remember Lockerbie Scotland and Pan Am flight 103? After all this time a new survivor memoir has emerged, written by the brother of one of the victims. David Dornstein, a budding writer, died in the bombing in 1988. His brother Ken set out to take David's notebooks and fufill the dream of publication. In the end, Ken did not have a complete enough manuscript to work with so he ended up writing a book about his experiences of grief after the catastrophe.

The Providence Journal describes the book this way. "Where the book is best is in Ken's search for meaning and minutia regarding the circumstnaces of David's death. Ken's writing is strong, and his research is thorougha dn relentless, almost to the point of being sad."

For those who want to know more about grief and grieving, this sounds like another valuable resource for the funeral home library or for study in the Funeral Service schools. Follow the link below and check it out.   

                     

Preneed: What happens to "legacy" funerals?

I suppose this comment comes at least 10 years ahead of its time. Hopefully the archive of this site will last long enough for me to say, "See!! I wrote about this first!"

Anyway, I just finished reading a finely detailed article by Alan Creedy as published in the latest Director magazine (the monthly publication of the National Funeral Directors Association). Alan spells out "typical" scenarios for preneed and how much value a funeral home can retain by keeping an active preneed program going. [Do keep in mind however that he has zero incentive to tell you anything but the most rosy picture about preneed. He has no business and no financial future should funeral directors head in another direction. This also applies to the hundreds of companies large and small who provide some sort of preneed services to funeral directors. THEY get their money up front--did you EVER notice that? We have to figure out how to administer these files and contracts and run these funerals, not them.]

To the next generation of funeral directors, I would pose this question. What happens when we don't want to run "traditional" funerals any longer? Not run traditional funerals, impossible you might say to yourself. We have served families in a certain way for 3 or 4 or 6 generations. This will continue!!!

Perhaps for some of you it will continue long enough to retire another generation but for many, a time will come when we regret having all those traditional funerals on the books. Some state laws and regulations REQUIRE you to provide the funeral specified. What happens if you can't or won't because you've stopped keeping the staff and equipment (particularly livery) around to service those kinds of funerals?

We and our predecessors have made promises we may not want to keep five, ten, fifteen years down the road. Our businesses and our business models will need to change dramatically in the years ahead to keep pace with the transformation of our society and its real consumer needs. Preneed (particularly in highly regulated states) could easily become an albatross keeping us from moving forward, moving on to meet future consumer need.