March 6, 2006--Death Be Not Cheap
Talk about entrepreneurship—A dear one has just died; you are grieving; your doorbell rings; you open the door thinking it is a family member or neighbor coming by to console you; but it is a stranger who hands you his business card; it is from the Peaceful Sleep Funeral Home; the bearer, an undertaker, offers his services; you live in Serbia and thus you have two choices—use the governmental funeral home, Lisje (you can only imagine what that involves), the private Peaceful Sleep, or one of the other 29 private funeral parlors that have cropped up in the town of Novi Sad during the past ten years.
Novi Sad is a city of about 300,000 and having so many funeral homes may seem to be more than the population requires. But Serbia is still recovering from the international sanctions imposed on it because of its genocidal behavior during the1990s and so Serbians have been seeking ways to make money in various unorthodox ways.
True, the funeral business in America is a huge and profitable industry (see The American Way of Death), but I have not as yet heard of undertakers here going door-to-door to push their services.
A NY Times article about Novi Sad (linked below) tells how funeral directors there bribe hospital workers to learn about who is either near death or has just died so they can get a jump on the competition and race to the family to sign them up. In some cases before the family has been officially notified about the death. There are even situations where the eager undertakers have jumped the gun—telling relatives that Uncle Morty has died, and getting them to purchase a coffin and other services, when in fact he is still alive!
So those of you who believe in privatization and deregulation as essential spurs to revitalize sluggish economies might want to rethink that position. On the other hand, a typical private funeral in Novi Sad is just $320. The last time I checked the cost of an average funeral in the US was about $5,000. So maybe the Novi Sadians are doing something right.
Novi Sad is a city of about 300,000 and having so many funeral homes may seem to be more than the population requires. But Serbia is still recovering from the international sanctions imposed on it because of its genocidal behavior during the1990s and so Serbians have been seeking ways to make money in various unorthodox ways.
True, the funeral business in America is a huge and profitable industry (see The American Way of Death), but I have not as yet heard of undertakers here going door-to-door to push their services.
A NY Times article about Novi Sad (linked below) tells how funeral directors there bribe hospital workers to learn about who is either near death or has just died so they can get a jump on the competition and race to the family to sign them up. In some cases before the family has been officially notified about the death. There are even situations where the eager undertakers have jumped the gun—telling relatives that Uncle Morty has died, and getting them to purchase a coffin and other services, when in fact he is still alive!
So those of you who believe in privatization and deregulation as essential spurs to revitalize sluggish economies might want to rethink that position. On the other hand, a typical private funeral in Novi Sad is just $320. The last time I checked the cost of an average funeral in the US was about $5,000. So maybe the Novi Sadians are doing something right.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
2:53 PM
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