Funeral Words

Having Trouble Keeping Your To-Do List Straight?

I post the following link only for fun. Still it demonstrates out of the box thinking and who knows, it might inspire you in some amazing and unexpected way.

http://www.worldwidefred.com/todotattoo.htm

Hershey's Raised Prices Today--How about you?

I saw a news item on the Business Week website. "Hershey Boosts Prices In Domestic Confectionery Line" citing increased costs of doing business, Hershey's has instituted a weighted average price increase of 13% effective immediately on its standard bar, king-size bar, 6-pack and vending lines.

Checked your prices lately? If not, I'm here to remind you that the time has come. I started unpacking the numbers today and will have changes implemented shortly.

Hershey's went for 13% in one of their core product lines. How much have your costs increased? Figure it out and make a change. Today's the day.

Harvard President Writes Book About Death

Two percent of the United States population died in uniform during the United States Civil War. That's the equivalent of 6 MILLION people dying in today's America, a staggering comparison.

Drew Gilpin Faust, currently the president of Harvard University, has published a critically acclaimed accounting of how those many deaths changed the culture of America and how that collective suffering helped bridge the divide between North and South.

My reading list is already very long, so I don't think I will get to this one any time soon, but follow the link to a review in the New York Times. Any of you interested in the history and cultural significance of death should get this into your library immediately, and maybe one of the associations such as NFDA should invite Ms. Gilpin Faust to speak.

NYTimes.com: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

                      

Update: I changed my mind and decided to put this book at the top of my reading list today. Here's the central thesis:

“… As they faced horrors that forced them to question their ability to cope, their commitment to the war, even their faith in a righteous God, soldiers and civilians alike struggled to retain their most cherished beliefs, to make them work in the dramatically altered world that war had introduced. Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives—and deaths—at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture. The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.”

I will keep you posted.

Economic Shifts Underway

In many respects, funeral service is "recession proof" in that people must take care of a funeral no matter their current economic circumstances. Nevertheless, people do have the ability to trim their spending and downsize their expectations when it comes to any sort of purchase.

The New York Times ran an article yesterday which talked about the dramatic shift in consumer spending which has started to show up in retail sales figures. Upscale items such as Coach handbags Burberry scarves saw a drop off over the holiday selling season, which many attribute to the housing slump.

Some experts have the opinion that many consumers used rising house values and home equity borrowing to help fuel their "masstige" (an amazing mash up of a word, combining "mass" as in mass-produced and the word "prestige") purchases and that those days may have come to an end for a while.

I don't think this makes a whole lot of difference for us here in the greater Fall River area in Massachusetts. We didn't have too many of those "mastige" consumers around here. However, in lots of other places where semi-upscale consumers have flocked to live over the years, even funeral homes may see a change in consumer spending and find that families become less open to service upgrades, higher scale mercandise and other "profit boosters" that some funeral home companies rely upon to make money.

New York Times Online: Thinking Twice About That $400 Handbag

Body Parts Lawsuit

A lawsuit in Ohio over the disposition of a young man's brain after autopsy, may cause some procedural changes depending upon the outcome. According to the story on MSNBC, the young man died in 2001 after plunging his car into a pond, a tragic outcome of an epileptic seizure. His brain, harvested for examination, did not get returned with the body for burial. The article does not clarify how years later the parents found out that the brain had been disposed of as medical waste. They have now brought a lawsuit on state constitutional grounds that they had a right to their son's brain, even though the law in force at the time allowed medical examiners to treat such body parts as medical waste.

Follow the link for the complete story.

MSNBC: Family sues after son is buried without brain

Dvorak on Productivity

John C. Dvorak, columnist and self-appointed technology curmudgeon for PCMagazine and other magazines, has drawn my attention for 20 years or more with his no-nonsense outlook on the true and imagined impact of computers and other electronic technologies on the world of business and home.

His latest column on PCMag.com Promises of Technology are Often BS, provides the reminder that though some innovations can and do make a difference in corporate productivity. It doesn't always work out that way and you have to know the difference. Definitely worth the read.

John C. Dvorak: Promises of Technology are Often BS

Thank You Tom Peters

Last August I attended a "strategic planning" seminar organized for funeral service companies. The program involved looking at the techniques described in a book called Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant.

I won't try and summarize the book. I have spent the last ten minutes trying to come up with a two sentence summary and it all sounds like gobbledygook. Let's just say it's a complex approach to business planning that most funeral homes should not waste time trying to learn.

HOWEVER, if you want to chew on some more practical ideas of how to make new and wonderful things happen with your business, take a look at Tom Peters' new list of 50 "Have yous..." I post the first 10 below followed by a link to the remainder.

Do these things and amazing transformations will happen with your business. No doubt about it, with none of the pain and suffering and lost time and energy wrapped up in a planning process that you do not understand.

Have you in the last 10 days ... visited a customer?
Have you called a customer ... TODAY?
Have you in the last 60-90 days ... had a seminar in which several folks from the customer's operation (different levels, different functions, different divisions) interacted, via facilitator, with various of your folks?
Have you thanked a front-line employee for a small act of helpfulness ... in the last three days?
Have you thanked a front-line employee for a small act of helpfulness ... in the last three hours?
Have you thanked a frontline employee for carrying around a great attitude ... today?
Have you in the last week recognized—publicly—one of your folks for a small act of cross-functional cooperation?
Have you in the last week recognized—publicly—one of "their" folks (another function) for a small act of cross-functional cooperation?
Have you invited in the last month a leader of another function to your weekly team priorities meeting?
Have you personally in the last week-month called-visited an internal or external customer to sort out, inquire, or apologize for some little or big thing that went awry? (No reason for doing so? If true—in your mind—then you're more out of touch than I dared imagine.)

The list continues at: Tom Peters "Have Yous"

Let me know how it goes. Post a comment. Thanks. And more importantly, thanks for reading.

Friday Word Origin

As a writer, I look for inspiration and ideas in all sorts of places. This year I bought the Word Origin Calendar, published by Accord Publishing, so that each day I would have a glimps into the origin of words. Some of those stories, such as the origin of the word "chowder", which came up on January 2nd, I find quite fascinating. Not everyone's cup of tea I understand but writers really need to know these things.

Anyway, I do not consider the following entry all that unique but it does fit our professional area and this may answer a question you have had for many years. Check it out.

For Friday, January 18, 2008 the page reads:

the quick and the dead * The dead do not move quickly, to be sure, but the "quick" in the sense of this long-attested English proverb are not rapid either. In Middle English, quikke meant "alive", so that the phrase means "both the living and the dead."

For what it's worth...

Have a wonderful weekend and GO PATS!!!

Wilbert Update

Many of you will remember the commentary I posted in October regarding my reaction to the Wilbert Burial Vault booth space at the NFDA National Convention. You can find the full text here.

For those of you wondering, it did take longer than I expected to receive the promotional materials we needed from an alternate supplier, plus the holidays got in the middle of things, but we did eventually make the transition away from Wilbert products at all of our funeral homes.

As a further example of my questioning about the focus of Wilbert Inc., has anyone noticed the print advertisement Wilbert has run in the January issue of The Director magazine? Under the headline "Protection" sits the picture of a turtle. Yes, I guess the shell might represent protection of a sort but it also brings to mind the unfortunate messiness which happens when a turtle tries to cross a busy roadway. It also looks ugly and less than alive and of course turtles have rarely been chosen as a symbol of vibrance and forward thinking.

Why did they allow such a visual message to get used on their behalf? I mean seriously, the poor thing looks ready for a casket itself rather than being a positive symbol of a forward thinking, energetic and smart company.

Somebody there just doesn't get it, and it shows.

Bizarre News

Corpse Wheeled to Check-Cashing Store

Click the headline to read the crazy but very legitimate news story (New York Times) about the criminals who actually wheeled a dead man in an office chair to the local check-cashing store in order to cash the man't social security check.