I blog about consumer pricing traps; things like cable bill add-ons, binding moving company estimates that turn out not to be binding, that sort of thing. A reader wrote in to me last year asking if I’d ever looked into funeral/cremation pricing because she felt like she was getting quoted one number and then billed for another after passing away. I hadn’t looked into it myself before, and am not especially thrilled with the results of having done so.
At root, the issue is that “all-inclusive” isn’t a regulated term. Any provider can slap it on a website, and what the term actually means varies wildly from one provider to the next, with the discrepancies only becoming apparent to a customer well into the process when they’re already committed and unable to walk.
I did a number of calls to providers in two different cities to see how representative the situation was in a single city. Calling in as a customer looking to get a cremation, one provider in Toronto (which families looking for cremation services Toronto are likely to stumble across) quoted a low headline price, but when asked to itemize the eleven potential additional charges (hidden in a PDF no one reads before signing) ranged from transfer distance caps to weekend surcharges, expedited processing fees, and extra certificate fees. None of the additional charges were presented on the phone, but all were disclosed (in writing) when asked.
I ran the same test, in this case using a direct cremation Montreal provider, using a reader’s experience with a provider they’d gone with. Compiling a list of the advertised costs versus what she was ultimately billed for (and very generously providing me with a copy of her final invoice for reference) revealed a similar pattern in a different city: a fifteen hundred dollar headline cost ballooning out to just over twenty-three hundred after factoring in transportation, an additional death certificate, and a weekend charge.
The exception in both cities were providers who quoted a single price on the first call, and had that same price reflected on the final invoice with no additional fees, itemized or otherwise; either everything was included or it wasn’t, and there were no surprises later on down the road. This is actually the definition of “all-inclusive” I’d encourage people to hold providers to when inquiring: not a nebulous marketing term, but a specific promise that the quoted number and the billed number will be the same.
When pricing this out yourself, or for a parent, the single question I’d recommend raising that gets to the heart of the matter in short order is something like, “if everything goes exactly as planned with no complications, are there any circumstances where my final bill could be higher than the number you just quoted me?” A provider with a truly all-inclusive price will say no, without qualification or caveat. Any provider who begins hedging or laying out exceptions is in effect saying “the number I just quoted you isn’t actually the number you’ll be paying”.
It’s a small industry with little natural transparency when it comes to pricing by default. The onus is on families to ask the right questions at the right time. It shouldn’t be this way, but it unfortunately does.
