Sticky Funeral Prices and Rigid Regulations in the COVID-19 Crisis.

• Author: Harrington, David E.
• Position: BRIEFLY NOTED

Thousands of Brooklynites have lost their lives to COVID-19. Last spring, at the height of the tragedy in New York City, relatives of the deceased were frantically scrambling to find a funeral director to handle arrangements for their loved one. Time was ticking. Hospitals wanted bodies collected as soon as possible. The city's medical examiner posted online that any bodies left unclaimed for two weeks would be buried on Hart Island, New York City's potter's field.

Early on, Brooklynites were calling Amy Cunningham, owner of Fitting Tribute Funeral Services, to ask about prices. Soon, they were only asking whether she would handle their case. Desperate to find help, some Brooklynites called John Quevedo, a funeral director in Yonkers, in the city's northern suburbs. As he talked to them, he often wondered how many funeral homes had turned them down, forcing them to look outside the city. Given that there are 256 funeral homes in New York City, there must have been a lot of fruitless phone calls.

The shortage of funeral directors wasn't surprising. The number of deaths in New York City during the COVID-19 spike was six times higher than normal. What's more, the spike increased the cost of providing direct cremations. Funeral directors tell harrowing stories of retrieving COVID-19 victims' bodies from cluttered apartments and disorganized hospital trailers. Soon, funeral directors were turning to outside help, paying twice the normal rate to have "trade guys" pick up bodies. Everyone was dealing with dwindling supplies of PPEs. And once they had the bodies, they still had to figure out how to get them cremated. Queues at local crematories forced them to either travel to available retorts far away or store corpses in refrigerators (or air-conditioned chapels) for longer than normal.

A new price equilibrium? / As an economist, I asked Cunningham whether she had increased her prices to respond to the surge. She said she hadn't and knew of no one who had. Nor had she heard of anyone "upselling" grieving families into buying more expensive options that provide larger margins. I asked her why she hadn't raised prices and she said she wasn't sure she could do so legally. She quickly added that she hadn't given the issue much thought because she was too busy waiting in line at the medical examiner's offices, retrieving bodies, driving to crematories, and answering phone calls.

I looked into whether funeral directors could legally raise their prices...