In April 2022, there was an uproar at the door of the morgue of three hospitals in Beijing.
Mr. Zhang was a little surprised and angry, holding only a sky-high bill of 38,750 yuan in his hand, accusing the morgue staff of sitting on the ground and raising the price.
"My widow has only been temporarily stored here for 3 days, why do I need 40,000 yuan? It's so dark! Mr. Zhang roared, and the relatives and friends who followed him also looked indignant.
However, some of the bosses who contracted the morgue complained: they had to pay 4 million a year for their own contract, and if the fee was low, they would not be able to recover the cost.
So, who exactly is making money, and what are the secrets of the funeral industry?
The source of this article is from the official media, and the specific links are repeated at the end of the article, but in order to improve the readability of the article, the details may be polished, please read sensibly, for reference only.
The profiteering funeral industry
Taking a tertiary hospital as an example, the morgue contracted by the funeral home costs about 300,000 yuan, but the funeral home will subcontract the contract to individual operators.
This level of transfer continued, and the final contract fee soared directly to 4 million a year.
The 4 million seems difficult to earn, but in fact, it can be repaid in two months.
From the moment the deceased was pulled into the morgue, the funeral industry began to "dig pits".
First of all, after entering Taiping, the body always has to wear a body bag, but the cost of the body bag is about ten yuan, but people charge 160.
If you don't buy it, you have to buy it.
In addition, there are messy items like temporary body disposal fees, cleaning fees, etc....
While the body is parked in the mortuary, the funeral director will also do everything possible to promote the mark-up service.
If the family wants to put on the makeup of the deceased one time, the price can easily be hundreds or thousands. If you want to take some posthumous photos as a souvenir, the photography fee will also cost hundreds of yuan.
After the burial, the deceased should also wear a shroud.
But between ordinary shrouds and those expensive shrouds, people can hardly tell the difference. So sometimes the cost of the shroud may be 50 yuan, and in the end, even if the price is 1,000 yuan, some people will buy it.
After buying a shroud, some family members do not personally wear it for the deceased, so they have to ask someone to do it for them.
From the number of pieces of shrouds to the difficulty of wearing shrouds, the minimum is 200 yuan.
As for the urn, the premium is even more serious, different materials, from ordinary wood to red sandalwood, almost more than 700 varieties, which ordinary customers can distinguish.
Good materials, bad materials, people insist on tens of thousands, and family members have money or not, so they don't have to buy it.
The coffin is the biggest money-making project.
The wooden coffin with a purchase price of 350 yuan is 5,000 for a layman in the funeral business, or if he seems to be rich;
If you have someone who understands the market, you can open a "preferential price" of 1500.
Of course, there are better coffins, with a purchase price of 1580, and a lion's big mouth, 18,000!
Every step of the way, such as decoration, transportation, etc., comes with a tip.
If you don't give it, there will be all kinds of unsatisfactory situations, such as the crooked placement of the body, untidy dressing, etc., in short, if you want the deceased to be buried with dignity, the family must give at least five or six hundred, thousands of tips.
This "one-stop" down, the fat is the sales side, the empty is the consumer side, and the busy supply side is the supply side.
Helpless consumers
For the funeral industry, we always avoid it, and when we really need it, we suddenly realize that we have the "leek" of the funeral industry.
First of all, after entering the funeral procedure, people are naturally like giving their relatives and friends a decent look, and no one is in the mood to be more narrow-minded about the details of the last journey of the deceased.
What's more, even if someone thinks the price is expensive and wants to bargain, they will be labeled as "unlucky" and "unfilial" by others, and they will be burdened with a heavy psychological burden.
At this moment, consumers are caught between passivity, grief and traditional ideologies, and it is often difficult to make effective choices.
Except for consumers, even the supply side doesn't make much money.
The supply side of profit microblogging
Tianjin Liudaokou is known as the "capital of shrouds". In this wholesale base camp of northern funeral supplies, there is a street about 2,000 meters long, and the street is densely distributed with hundreds of funeral merchants, and the signboard with white letters on a black background is particularly eye-catching.
Although a large number of funeral practitioners from all over the country come here every year to buy goods in batches, for the merchants of Liudaokou, they can't make much money at all.
According to statistics, the per capita income of Liudaokou Village in Tianjin is only 19,000 yuan.
In the special industry of funeral, the demand often comes suddenly, so even if someone knows about Tianjin Liudaokou, it is difficult for ordinary consumers to rush there in person.
In the end, they are at the mercy of hospital morgues and funeral homes, and there is no way to shop around and pick and choose.
Even if the villagers of Liudaokou are unwilling and want to go out.
However, due to the single product category and many competitors, they could not sell at a high price, so they had to wholesale supplies such as shrouds to funeral homes at low prices, thus becoming a simple supplier.
With the development of the Internet, the sacrificial industry has also begun to touch the Internet.
In recent years, more and more funeral supplies such as shrouds and coffins have been sold on major e-commerce platforms and vertical websites.
Online channels have brought great convenience to consumers, who can choose from the comfort of their homes without having to visit a physical store.
This new sales model has naturally attracted the dissatisfaction of traditional brick-and-mortar stores.
For them, online shopping is undoubtedly a competitor from the side, further dispersing the limited customer resources in the region.
In order to maintain their business, some brick-and-mortar merchants have begun to erect layers of barriers to prevent consumers from making door-to-door purchases.
epilogue
Birth, old age, sickness and death are the only way to live. In the face of the grief of the death of a loved one, everyone should be silently respected.
However, many black-hearted traders take advantage of this to promote superstition and anxiety among consumers, and to open up for their own selfishness.
In this regard, the relevant management departments should increase supervision and purify the market environment.
Only by holding those traders who extort money and hunt for huge profits accountable for law and discipline, and let the sunshine of healthy competition shine again on the traditional and emerging models, can the sacrificial industry become healthier and healthier.
Shingen
[1] Guangming.com - "Guangming.com Commentator: "Sky-high funeral expenses", it's time to be cured-Today's headlines"
[2] Observatory - "The Funeral Industry You Don't Know: The Coffin Purchase Price is 1580 and the Sale Price is 18000; The mortuary contract fee is 4 million a year, and each corpse earns 4,000 to keep the capital"