National Casket Retailers Assoc.

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HOW big is the funeral service industry and sales to the public?

Statistics taken from The Standard.com site: " .....The NFDA hedged it's bets in a 1997 report, estimating the amount spent on funeral services and their related expenses at $16 BILLION to $24 billion annually. ......Research by others, came up with $21.6 billion....

..With just over 2.3 million deaths reported in the United States in 1997,
the most recent year for which statistics are available, that breaks
down to nearly $10,000.00 for each and every person passing to the great beyond."

" There are basically three big players in the funeral industry. Service Corp. International, or SCI, the Loewen Group (LWN) (currently in bankruptcy) and Stewart Enterprises (STEI), which are said to own 15 percent of the country's 23,000 funeral homes,
handling a fifth of all funerals..."

"...There is a broad market in pre-need planning, with more than 50 BILLION currently collected and held in escrow for people who expect to live many more years. In other words, there are big bucks in the float."

There are now many new and inventive ways for the funeral industry to try to recoup the lost dollars from sales of caskets. The newest way is to open their own "casket store" and put up their own web site - and NOT tell anyone or state that they are owned or run by funeral directors. People have heard about such good deals that the retailers offer, now one needs to ask if the owner is a funeral director. Shouldn't it state that somewhere without asking? Because the true third party retailers beat their prices by a lot, most all of the time. And some of those web sites by the funeral directors and big conglomeration firms, trying to "wrap up all the sales" were started with up to $550,000.00 seed money, that should speak volumes.

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Oct 00 annual meeting report * membership benefit's update

September 2000

August 2000

January/February 1999

August, September 1998

July 1998

April, May, June 1998

March 1998

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January 1998

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