The price of cheap
The cheap cremation was never a new idea. Small, local operators have been doing simple, no-fuss cremations for a long time, quietly, at a fair price. What they’ve never had is investor money. When you keep your prices low there isn’t much left over for advertising, and you can’t outspend a company with millions behind it.
So when the big players arrive, they tend to follow a familiar playbook (think ride share, food delivery…). Come in cheap, spend big on marketing, take the market, then lift the price once people think you’re the only option. Investors want their money back, with interest. Someone pays for that, and it’s families.
Price isn’t the only thing that slips. When a business is built for volume and growth, the people doing the actual work get stretched thin. Collection times get missed or mixed up. Safety standards slide. “Available 24/7” turns out to mean a booking line, not someone who’ll come out at 2am. And when the system is running fast, the mistakes get bigger. Imagine planning a viewing, your last chance to see your person, and finding out it can’t happen because of an error somewhere down the line.
Don’t get me wrong, mistakes happen in every business. But the further the decisions are from the person in the care of a business, the more room there is for things to go wrong.
So what can you do?
- Ask who will actually be collecting your person, and whether they’re local.
- Ask what happens after hours. Who picks up the phone at 2am?
- Ask for the price in writing, and what’s not included.
- Ask how prices have changed over the last few years. A fair operator won’t mind telling you.
- Look a little further than the first ad on the page. The small operator in your area might be cheaper, and they’ll probably know your street.
We’re the cheap ones around here, and I’ll admit that comes with a bit of suspicion. Someone once left a comment on one of our posts: “Remember you get what you pay for…” Before we’d even had a chance to reply, a few families we’d looked after jumped in to tell them otherwise. Not long after, the comment quietly disappeared. (We didn’t say a word. We didn’t need to.)
They were right about one thing though. You do get what you pay for, just not always in the way you’d think. Cheap and good aren’t opposites. Plenty of small businesses prove that every day. They just can’t afford to tell you about it.
If you’d like a chat about what a simple cremation should cost, shoot us a message. No pressure, and no ads… well, maybe this one.