FTC has issued some information on Caskets from third parties like Walmart and Costco
One of the way Funeral directors have tried to get around NOT BEING ABLE TO CHARGE families and consumers for third party Caskets in the USA is to charge the Consumer for Packaging disposal. Costco and Walmart distributing caskets have upset funeral directors so much that the National Funeral Directors Association, the NFDA had a board member recently testifiy before Congress on third party casket.
The Chief Counsel of the National Funeral Directors Association recently examined an Opinion letter issued by the FTC on third Party caskets. The lawyer for the NFDA , advises funeral directors and funeral home owners what they can and cannot do when third party caskets are purchased.
What all this indicates is that the Funeral Industry is doing all it can to squeeze evey dollar out of the funeral family, the funeral consumer. If you obtain a third party casket which I recommend you do, do not pay for packaging disposal.
Universal Casket Company, which supplies the caskets that are sold by Costco, recently sought guidance from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff about the delivery of third-party caskets to funeral homes. In response to that request, FTC Funeral Rule Coordinator Craig Tregillus issued an opinion letter on April 19, 2010 that addressed several important issues, including whether funeral homes must assist in unloading third-party caskets from delivery trucks and the disposal of packing materials. Highlights from the opinion include the following:
“Disposal of Packaging. In a footnote in the Staff Advisory Opinion, Mr. Tregillus provides guidance on the increasingly troublesome issue of third-party casket packaging. Funeral homes have reported that casket shipments that originate from Costco and Wal-Mart often are packaged in crates which require the funeral home to incur labor and disposal cost. The FTC Staff Advisory Opinion indicates that while funeral homes may not charge a consumer for the cost of disposing of the packaging, the Funeral Rule does not prevent a funeral provider from requiring that all casket suppliers take any casket packaging with them and dispose of it after a delivery. In other words, as long as the funeral home requires casket wholesalers from which it purchases caskets to dispose of casket packaging materials, it may also impose the same requirement on third-party casket shippers delivering caskets to the funeral home.”via www.nfda.org
Funeral Industry|Funeral News|Funeral Blog by Your Funeral Guy.
Charging for Disposal for packaging is simply funeral home anger for purchasing a casket from a third party.
Tags: "FTC", "National Funeral Directors Association", caskets, costco, funeral blog, funeral industry, funeral news, NFDA, packaging, Third Party Caskets, Universal Casket, walmart
