GRUESOME STATISTICS

Taranaki Daily News, 8 October 1928, Page 11

GRUESOME STATISTICS

COST OF FUNERALS. AN INTERESTING INVESTIGATION. The Americans are great believers in compiling statistics of a business character, and they have become so accustomed to this that the whole business community render 4h© compilers every assistance. The British are much more conservative, and g. :iorally to compile British statistics leg: ir.tion is required, whereas in America the information would be voluntarily given and the cost borne privately. There is no limit to the ingenuity, nor, it must be conceded, to the utility of the propaganda campaign of the American life assurance offices. The latest departure is an investigation into the cost of funerals, and so thorough is the manner in which the work has been undertaken, that foreign countries as well as the United States have been included in the scope of the inquiry. The burden of the study has been borne by the Metropolitan Life of New York, which voted £5OOO towards the costs, but the direction has been in the hands of an advisory committee on which a variety of interests were represented.

The origin of the inquiry is frankly altruistic. The Metropolitan Life found that funeral charges, especially to the low income section of its policy holders, were excessive, and for the last 20 years it has made steady efforts to get them reduced chiefly by throwing on them the searchlight of publicity. Some amazing revelations are made by the statistical tables. In America the average wholesale cost per funeral has risen since 1880 from about £2 to £lO, notwithstanding that the increase in the number of undertakers has been 378 per cent., as compared with an advance of only 39 per cent, in the number of deaths. Competition has had little effect here in keeping down prices. In four selected groups of businesses the average profit per funeral is shown to have ranged from £7 to £l4. A part of the rise in cost must he assigned to the mere exacting requirements of relatives and other mourners, and to the more elaborate furniture, fittings and apparel used. Thus between 1899 and 1025 the volume of business in the furniture industry went up from £25.063,000 io £164,632,000, and in the goods industry front £2,790,000 to £14,082.000.

Social status as defined by funeral costs is not uninteresting. In New York the charges in connection with estates of £2OO average £74, and go up to £615 for estates of £200,000 and

over. The details from abroad indicate that i:t Great Britain funeral obsequies cost from £lO to £200; in Paris from £3 to £7B; in Spain from £3 to £965; in Sweden from £6 to £6O, and in Berlin from £lO up to whatever one likes to pay. These figures are all probably more or less arbitrary, but they serve to give some idea of the wide range of tariff that prevails for consigning our mortal remains to their last resting .place.