Jun 3, 2006
Stiff competition
By Ho Ai Li
For the ultimate send-off, funeral homes here now offer
Mercedes-Benz or limousine hearses. Others do up lorries like mini
temples, with resplendent bronze-tiled roofs and life-size Buddha
statues. For the coolest exit, however, home-grown casket company
Singapore Funeral Services offers air-conditioned coffins. They
cost $2,988 for a basic model to $8,888 for a greener model with
multi-split inverters.
As competition heats up in the local undertaking industry,
undertakers are serving up a plethora of new products and
professionalised services.
Instead of casket shops, companies are called funeral directors, as
in Britain and the United States. Besides selling coffins, urns and
funeral clothes, these one-stop death supermarkets also package in
a death certificate, a wake and a cremation slot - for a fee, of
course.
Ten years ago, there were about 40 casket shops here. Now, there
are almost 60 players. This week saw another entrant, All Saints
Christian Bereavement Services, which opened on Thursday.
This does not include the hundreds of middlemen angling for a cut
of the funeral business. They could be char kway teow sellers or
cabbies, basically anyone with a funeral parlour contact, hoping to
earn a $500 commission for each successful referral.
Direct Funeral Services owner Roland Tay, 58, who has been in the
business for 22 years and is often in the news for sponsoring the
funerals of murder victims such as Huang Na and Liu Hongmei, says:
'Every day there are about 40 deaths. There are more funeral
companies than deaths.'
Many have seen their business shrivel up and - sometimes - die. Mr
Tay estimates that up to 10 funeral companies exit the scene each
year.
Casket company Ang Yew Seng, in the industry for over 20 years,
used to handle 40 to 50 cases a month in the 1980s. Business has
since halved.
The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s saw many put aside
their pride and prejudice and step into what is known in Britain as
'the dismal trade'.
Mr Charles Wan, 63, director of Casket Company, 63, says: 'When the
economy went bad, people went out of jobs. They forgot about
pantang (superstition in Malay) and reason that everyone has to
die.'
Many of the new entrants are former casket company employees
striking out on their own, or those in related industries such as
suppliers of chairs or tidbits at wakes.
Many are drawn in by the promise of 'easy money'.
Mr Victor Hoo, 37, funeral director of Singapore Funeral Services
(SFS), adds: 'In Singapore, more and more people are looking for a
job that can give them fast cash. Three to five days' funeral, fast
cash.'
There is now no lack of Singaporeans willing to take up odd jobs in
the funeral line, including teenagers on school vacations to those
in their 40s.
Mr Freddie Choo, 52, chairman of Trinity Casket, says: 'It's good
money in the sense that an outing carrying a coffin can earn them
$40 to $50...They just carry it, then put it down.'
Another industry veteran Olivia Stravens, 43, formerly Trinity's
operations manager, adds: 'It's better than working at a fast-food
joint where you only earn $5 an hour.'
With deaths going up from about 10,000 a year in the 1950s to
almost 16,000 now in tandem with population growth, the future
looks bright for the gloom trade... ... ...
