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Pushing overpriced useless junk to emotionally vulnerable people? No. There is a necessary service of digging a hole and putting a corpse in a box into it, but
by rozab 5y ago
Pushing overpriced useless junk to emotionally vulnerable people? No. There is a necessary service of digging a hole and putting a corpse in a box into it, but the whole business of $10k coffins and embalming and such is both unnecessary and quite unique to the US.
- wutbrodo 5y agoExpensive funerals are far from "unique to the US". The US spends substantially less as a proportion of income than Japan, China, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, and New Zealand, and is within a couple percent of a half dozen other countries. [1] https://businesstech.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/SunLife.png https://businesstech.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/S...
- rozab 5y agoI did look this up and found slightly different numbers: https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/how-much-does-a-funeral-cost https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/how-much-d... https://nfda.org/news/statistics https://nfda.org/news/statistics But I would maintain that the invasive practice of embalming is unnecessary and unusual elsewhere in the world.
- wutbrodo 5y agoI think those are consistent with the numbers I found
- floor2 5y agoHa, I think the internet needs a new term like Godwin's Rule or Gell-Mann Amnesia or whatever for the constant claims of "This only happens in America" or "This problem is worse in America than anywhere else" and then the reality is that the US is in line with averages or norms in other countries or cultures.
- wutbrodo 5y agoAnything that's a cheap way to get midwit upvotes is an unsolvable problem as far as I can tell.
- tomatotomato37 5y agoCan we also have one for "Europe does X better" where Europe really just means France, Scandinavia the wealthy half of Germany, and maybe UK, and not the more irreputable countries like Belarus or Serbia?