The casket, then, can be constructed of the most rustic materials or the most expensive metals—and anything in between. Just like cars, casket offerings start out as basic squares with few frills and can become elaborately crafted units with velvet interiors and leather-wrapped carrying handles.
Cloth-covered wood $300–$500
20-gauge steel (non-sealer) $500–$995
18-gauge steel (sealer) $1,200–$3,800
16-gauge steel (sealer) $3,900–$6,500
Stainless steel (sealer) $3,500–$7,000
Solid copper (sealer) $4,400–$9,500
Solid bronze (sealer) $4,500–$17,000
Solid bronze with 14-carat gold plating $29,000–$35,000
Selected hardwood veneers $1,600–$3,400
Solid pecan $3,200–$3,800
Solid maple $3,200–$5,000
Solid oak $2,900–$5,000
Solid cherry $3,500–$7,500
Solid mahogany $7,500–$9,500
The cheapest caskets are made of thick cardboard or particleboard and covered with doeskin. Their interiors are fitted with low-grade crepe and cotton wadding, with correspondingly inexpensive pillows. Such caskets are used for both in-ground burials and pre-cremation viewings. They are sometimes referred to as paupers’ caskets, as some funeral homes also use them for indigent decedents when they expect little or no payment.
Cloth-covered wood is the next step up, with particleboard covered in blue-, gray-, or burgundy-embossed cloth. The interiors of these are also inexpensive, and sometimes they have a filler of wood shavings in lieu of bedding, which is covered by the interior material. Still featured in funeral homes’ display rooms, they serve a useful purpose—they are readily burnable when cremation follows a visitation and they look so cheap that families turn away in horror and instantly upgrade to more expensive models.
The next category of caskets is twenty-gauge steel. Gauges range from twenty, the thinnest, to eighteen and sixteen, the thickest and therefore the most expensive. All twenty-gauge caskets are virtually shaped the same but are available in a variety of exterior and interior colors. As prices rise, trim options increase as well—two-tone color schemes, better interior materials, and even swing bar handles on the outside.
The most basic twenty-gauge is a non-sealer, in which the lid has a small metal catch that attaches to a corresponding hole in the front when closed. In contrast, a sealer casket features a seamless rubber gasket attached to the upper portion of the box. When the lid is closed, a crank is inserted into a hole at the right-side foot of the casket and the lid is closed via an internal gear system that forces the lid against the rubber gasket, thus rendering the casket permanently closed. Some twenty-gauge caskets; most all eighteen- and sixteen-gauge steel caskets; and all stainless steel, copper, and bronze caskets are “sealers.” Customers choose sealers more often because funeral directors tell them that the casket becomes air- and watertight, thus forestalling the process of decay.
I have often questioned whether this system accomplishes an actual seal—and the Federal Trade Commission has asked itself the same thing. The FTC now instructs funeral directors to inform families that a sealer casket equipped with a rubber gasket is resistant to air and water. At far too many mausoleums in mid-July, I’ve experienced a pungent bouquet emanating from those sealers. What’s more, a sealer casket isn’t that important, since nearly all cemeteries require that the casket be placed into a burial vault (more on that a bit later).
The next level of casket, and the most popular one, is eighteen-gauge steel. Most casket sales from the 1970s to the present have been eighteen-gauge-steel selections. Most grieving families do not want to appear cheap, and this medium-priced model fits the bill nicely. I have probably heard the following a thousand times: “We don’t want the best, but we don’t want the cheapest either. Show us something priced in the middle.”
Virtually every color (and combination of colors) is available in the eighteen-gauge selection, as well as interior upgrades, such as velvet, tailoring, and head cap panels (the interior lid panel at the head of the casket), custom-designed with any theme imaginable. Funeral homes generally employ a 150 percent markup to arrive at that retail figure—but I’ve heard tales of some funeral homes charging four or even five times their wholesale price. The majority of funeral homes nationwide offer reasonably priced, affordable eighteen-gauge steel caskets, and such caskets have become the benchmarks of successful sales.
Today’s shaky economy has had a tremendous impact on casket sales. In the 1970s and l980s, employers used to provide company-paid life insurance, which included coverage for funeral expenses. But today most employers have dropped that benefit. The salad days of the funeral business are gone. Before customers didn’t have to worry about how much to spend at the funeral home, and I can recall many occasions when folks stopped by to pay the funeral bill riding in their new car, courtesy of life insurance proceeds. Consumers are obviously more cost conscious today, and a growing majority have to pay funeral costs out of their own pockets. This trend has spawned a great push in marketing lower-cost, twenty-gauge-steel caskets, the thinnest gauge available. The major casket manufacturers are introducing a vast array of choices in the inexpensive line to capture sales of any kind. Extravagant and expensive funerals are on the decline even in traditional Bible Belt strongholds, and many more families are considering what would have been unthinkable to them a generation ago: cremation.
The high-end casket market still exists, though, and it includes stainless steel, copper, and bronze. In the 1970s, the major casket manufacturers, Batesville Casket Company and Aurora Casket Company, encouraged funeral directors to aggressively market the high-end units. They devised ingenious marketing tools and materials for funeral home owners, to demonstrate the durability of high-end caskets to customers.
Stainless-steel caskets, the next step upward, indicate quality, and the eye appeal often more than justifies the price increase. Stainless-steel caskets were touted as the obvious choice of material to wise housewives back in the day—they knew that the same stainless steel was used to make long-lasting knives, forks, and spoons in the kitchen at home. A framed advertising featuring a beautiful apron-clad homemaker was placed in stainless-steel caskets to appeal to women venturing into the casket-selection room. The beautiful homemaker was shown holding a wooden, velvet-lined utensil case to demonstrate that stainless steel was the ultimate material for durability.
Copper and bronze caskets, the most expensive and most profitable sales for funeral homes, have received a great deal more marketing attention than stainless-steel ones. Copper and bronze do not rust. Casket companies emphasize that point in their promotional materials in hopes that intelligent and progressive funeral directors will impart such information to families and push on them the belief that the body contained therein would be unaffected. Casket companies used to provide funeral directors with small copper and bronze samples to display inside caskets so that consumers could touch them and imagine how genuinely protected their deceased loved ones would be. The Statue of Liberty, constructed of copper, was a popular lithograph displayed in caskets to tout copper’s durability, as were photos of copper gutters on expensive homes.
Casket companies also advise funeral directors to strategically position an expensive unit right inside the selection-room door. Casket makers recommend that the first casket the consumer notice be a copper or bronze model, because 75 percent of the time, men select the first casket they see. It’s assumed that men do this because they like to seem decisive and in control. In reality, though, I think that men walk into the selection room and point to the first casket that catches their eye just so they can get out of the room. Women, however, tend to shop for caskets with a greater degree of deliberation: they compare prices, feel the interior material, ask questions, even lay the burial garments of the deceased inside a casket to make sure the color combination is just right. Mom’s periwinkle suit must pick up the navy of the casket’s interior; Dad’s camel sports coat must match the tan pillow. Yet it’s still a man’s world at the funeral home; the majority of male-headed households leave the casket choice to the man of the house.