It’s hard to look at Robert Waltrip, the 89-year-old founder and chairman emeritus of death-care giant Service Corp International and not see a striking resemblance to Henry Waternoose, the CEO of the fictional “Monsters, Inc.” from the Pixar movie of the same name—in terms of looks and the fact that both men’s businesses involved profiting from the wailing of the most vulnerable. Under Waltrip’s leadership, SCI snaked its tendrils from its home state of Texas to suction up family-run funeral homes across the country, transforming itself into a death-industry leviathan that owns close to a quarter of all funeral homes nationwide and that has never been in short supply of accusations of consumer malpractice.

Now, amid a global pandemic that even optimistic prognosticators believe could result in more lives lost and buried than during the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, companies like SCI could be on the verge of something truly monstrous. After nearly a half-century of regulatory oversight, the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule is up for its 10-year review next month. That rule had traditionally served as the main bulwark of consumer protection against the outrageous business practices that are a hallmark of the funeral industry’s more predatory firms. But death-dealers like SCI have spent a tidy fortune lobbying against these consumer safeguards, and with a conservative-leaning FTC board set to decide the rule’s fate, it seems likely that the existing regulations will be defanged to their liking. And it will all go down just as America’s pain becomes a rich vein of profit for the industry to tap.



The FTC’s Funeral Rule was enacted in 1984 to prohibit the egregious price-gouging and hidden fees that funeral industry firms formulated to ambush consumers at their most vulnerable: after the death of a loved one. Before the rule, funeral homes were notorious for extorting grieving families through a host of shady practices, which included making false statements about the necessity of embalming, hiding prices in every step of the burial and cremation processes, and framing expensive caskets and urns as the most “modestly priced receptacles.”



By the mid-1980s, the need for reform had already long been apparent. In 1963, investigative journalist Jessica Mitford wrote The American Way of Death, which chronicled the unconscionable practices that she observed as commonplace in the funeral industry. In its pages, Mitford warned of how these abuses might escalate as larger, consolidated firms took over the industry.



“No matter what the eventual development of the funeral industry—whether it remains overcrowded or moves, as it seems inevitable, in the direction of the large supermarket type of operation,” Mitford wrote, “there is cold comfort for the consumer. Once having driven out their small competitors, there is no reason to believe the big volume concerns will demonstrate a more tender regard for the pocketbooks of their customers than has traditionally been the case in the Dismal Trade.”

