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FUNERAL STORES OPEN IN STRIPS, EYE MALLS

By Edmund Mander

The Memorial Store sells caskets in a setting that is more home store than funeral home.

Mark Panciera describes his stores in terms any other retailer might use: bright interiors, wide aisles and a friendly staff. His chain is ideal for strip centers and eventually, he predicts, it will also work well in malls. Like any skilled retailer, he studies demographics and pays attention to co-tenancy.

Panciera isn’t selling apparel, cosmetics or furniture, though. He sells affordable funerals through The Memorial Store, his Hollywood, Fla.-based three-store funeral service chain that he plans to expand dramatically in the coming two years.

Banish all thoughts of the typical funeral home, though, with its dark wood and heavy velvet interiors. The inside of The Memorial Store is about as close to a funeral home as a day spa. There are no embalming tables, no wall-to-wall coffins, no heavy curtains muffling Hammond organ dirges from an adjacent chapel. In fact, there is no adjacent chapel.

Don’t expect to see a lot of grim-faced men in black suits, either: The Memorial Store’s staff are hired for their retail and customer-service skills, and come knowing as much about embalming as the average Macy’s jewelry counter staffer.

“They’re much like that engaging salesperson at the Clinique counter,” said the 38-year-old Panciera. Attractively arranged merchandise ranges from keepsake boxes for mementos of the deceased to memorial quilts, wind chimes, urns and garden stones. Aromatic devices and fountains contribute to a calm ambience. “It’s a very inviting environment; it’s not threatening.”

In short The Memorial Store is as much about customer service as about funeral services.

Panciera became the third generation of his family to enter the funeral business when he joined the Panciera Memorial Home family firm in 1984, a company that continues to offer traditional funeral services.

But he also recognized that the industry was not responding to some significant social and demographic trends, and in 1994 established Funeraria Panciera to cater to the growing Hispanic community’s particular traditions in funerals.

Spotting other trends, he opened The Memorial Store in 1997, because baby boomers were seeking alternative ways to celebrate the lives of dead family and friends, and increasing numbers of people were looking for less expensive funeral options.

“People are very much aware of their creative options, and they want to be provided opportunities to select something unique,” he said. His company arranges anything from burial at sea to a musical program of Glenn Miller recordings, and also organizes grief counseling groups. “We attracted a new demographic, a new market segment.”

His first Memorial Store, which opened in a Hollywood strip center — he bought the strip center too — took some of its inspiration from mass retailers, and his subsequent stores have retained the basic format: Overhead signs identify the various departments — coffins, urns, mementos, etc. — and all the merchandise is clearly marked with price tags, making it more like The Home Depot than a funeral home.

He opened a second strip center location in 1999 in Pembroke Pines, Fla., and it is no coincidence that co-tenants at this location include a chiropractor, a senior care consultant, an eldercare day center, a probate and estate lawyer, a financial planner and a church. A third location opened more recently at a freestanding site in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., opposite a cemetery. “It’s a death-care intersection,” Panciera noted.

Panciera is not alone in recognizing an opportunity in the shifting attitudes toward death and funerals. Other businesses have sprouted in recent years to compete with traditional funeral companies, some offering caskets for less, others providing complete funerals.

“If the profit margins [at traditional homes] were not as high as they were, there would be no need for companies like mine to be in business,” said Ken Sterling, managing director of Fort Lauderdale-based The Casket Store, which he founded in 1997. Originally a brick-and-mortar store, Sterling decided to become a pure-play Internet retailer — www.thecasketstores.com — offering coffins ranging from $800 to $20,000. He said he sells about 10 coffins a week.

As its name suggests, The Casket Store focuses solely on the sale of coffins, profiting from a federal law that requires funeral homes to allow their customers to buy caskets from another source.

Funeral homes have been enjoying profit margins of between 300% and 500% on their coffins, Sterling explained. “The opportunity was there for the taking; there’s money to be made here if you give people a fair shake.”

The Memorial Store has two strip center locations and one freestanding store.

The average funeral, including a casket, costs about $5,000, according to Kelly Smith, public relations manager at the National Funeral Directors Association, Brookfield, Wis. Panciera said his funerals cost about half that.

“There has been a significant change in the attitudes of funeral service consumers over the past 20 years; they are looking for more individual and more meaningful funeral services,” Smith said. “They have become a much better informed consumer than previous generations.”

Such companies are especially in demand in urban areas, with their more eclectic tastes, said George Clarke, executive director of Selected Independent Funeral Homes, an invitation-only organization representing independently owned funeral homes meeting a set of standards of professional conduct.

In his first nine months, Panciera said he booked 170 funerals, which is what traditional funeral homes do in their first year; last year he doubled that.

Over the coming year Panciera said he is focusing on a major national expansion through franchises with funeral home professionals who meet his own ethical and professional guidelines.

He said the concept is likely to be especially popular on the East and West Coasts and in metropolitan areas. At press time Panciera said he had not yet decided how many stores he would be opening.

Panciera said he foresees putting the stores in malls, eventually. Right now, though, mall landlords and their customers are not quite ready for a full-blown store, he said.

John Mott, general manager for Palisades Center, West Nyack, N.Y. — famous for trying new concepts — was cautious when first told of the concept. “It does run the risk of being a downer,” he said.

Even strip center operator John Delatour, managing director of Regency Centers, Jacksonville, Fla., questioned whether funeral service stores would make ideal tenants. They will generate low traffic, and their customers are not likely to be in a mind to spend money with other tenants. However, his company has done a deal with a funeral service store in Northern California, he added.

Customers and mall executives alike could quickly get used to the idea, noted Panciera. In malls, his company could begin by installing kiosks and information carts where people can design their own ceremony.

After all, The Memorial Store resembles a store far more closely than a funeral home, he and others say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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