BOSTON (AP) -- With many dead and buried, storefront casket shops are anything but a gateway to financial heaven.
"The major problem is that nobody gets up on a Saturday morning and says 'Let's go casket shopping,' " said Jim St. George, founder, president and chief executive officer of Consumer Caskets USA, an Erie, Pa.-based funeral services retailer.The recent demise of Massachusetts' first direct-to-the-customer casket store came after it made just one sale in 18 months.
Framingham-based Caskets Direct to You, carried 24 caskets ranging in price from $520 to $4,500, and served as a distributor for Casket Royale, a Hampton Falls, N.H.-based manufacturer.
St. George said the truth about entrepreneurs getting into the casket business is that many are unprepared. They open a storefront, put some coffins in the window along with a discount sign and expect the cash to flow.
Consumer Caskets is taking a different approach, hiring the interior designer who works for Sears, Roebuck & Co., selling a wide variety of funeral-related products and pushing their caskets to the back of a brightly lit store.
"Our stores are full retail. They look and taste and feel full retail," St. George said. But, he said, the 3-year-old company is still in the red.
St. George advised others not to put all their eggs in one casket, and include tombstones, catalog sales and other products in their businesses.
Casket retail outlets began springing up around the country a few years ago when the Federal Trade Commission ruled that America's 23,000 funeral homes had to accept caskets purchased elsewhere and couldn't charge a handling fee for doing so.
In New York, Direct Casket boasts two locations and prices up to 75 percent off those found in mortuaries. With the average cost of burying someone topping $5,000, it's easy to see why some might shop for a bargain.
Kevin Gray, Direct Casket's chief executive, said customer reaction in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens was strong enough to warrant opening a Long Island location just last month. Those three stores and the company's four in California sell about 250 caskets each month, producing annual revenues of about $3 million.
Doug Summer, Casket Royale's vice president, declined to reveal the privately held company's 1997 income, but said about 12,000 caskets were sold.
George Lemke, executive director of the Evanston, Ill.-based Casket and Funeral Supply Association of America, said the demise of shops like Caskets Direct to You is only a symptom of consumers' overall unwillingness to step outside funeral homes for after-death services.
Most of the retail casket stores opened over the past 15 years have closed, Lemke said. He estimated the direct casket distributors hold only about 1 percent of the casket market nationally.
"I definitely wouldn't classify it as a get-rich-quick scheme," he said.