Few funeral homes are required to disclose funeral pricing information on their website, according to a new report.
In 2016, the median expense for a funeral was $7,306, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. For the grief-stricken family, this is a vulnerable time as a consumer, the report stressed.
“With easily available price information, consumers who today spend an average of more than $7,000 on a funeral could often lower that figure considerably,” said Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America. “And just the availability of this information online would tend to restrain prices for all funeral services,” he added.
Only the state of California requires a funeral home to post their “General Price List,” online for consumers, according to The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) and the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA).
In Sacramento, Calif., 32 funeral homes were surveyed and of the 25 funeral homes with websites, 18 (72%) posted their General Price List. Seven funeral homes did not have websites and two homes were in violation of the California law for not posting any pricing online or providing a list of services, as listed in the report.
“In an era when the large majority of consumers use the Internet to shop, the FTC should extend the Funeral Rule disclosure requirement to funeral homes with websites,” said Josh Slocum, president of the Funeral Consumers Alliance. “The cost of posting an existing price list is insignificant,” he added.
Funeral home practices have been standardized to hand out pricing literature only if asked to do so by an individual in person, and online funeral pricing information is not easily accessed and often it is hidden on a resource page or hidden on a non-intuitive page for consumers, according to Slocum.
The report also surveyed 211 funeral homes in 25 cities and 193 had websites. Only 53 (27%) of the 193 funeral homes with websites posted any prices online and only 30 (16%) of the 193 posted their complete “General Price List” on their website, the CFA and FCA reported.
ORC International surveyed 1,000 adult Americans by phone in 2017 and 79 percent polled said that funeral homes should be required to post funeral prices online.
The Federal Trade Commission’s 1984 Funeral Rule requires funeral homes to provide a printed price list before any funeral planning conversation takes place. However, the report said that most states do not require such a disclosure and have no fixed pricing publicly available to the consumer. The 1984 rule was enacted prior to the Internet, thus creating a loophole for consumers, the report mentioned