As an example, prices for simple cremation in Philadelphia range from $3,200 to $1,095.
The two groups are warning that advertised prices can be misleading.
“Thirty-one of the surveyed funeral homes (22%) advertised a price for their Direct Cremation package that failed to include the cost of the cremation process itself, making the price for a simple cremation seem artificially low,” the survey cautioned.
Deceptive funeral practices have been a seminal target of consumer activists for over half of a century.
Jessica Mitford’s “The American Way of Death” came out in 1963 and was followed two years later by Ralph Nader’s indictment of the auto industry, “Unsafe at Any Speed.”
An oracle before her time in death even as in life, Mitford was cremated in in 1996.
Her funeral cost: $533.31.