THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 30, 1996 TAG: 9610300589
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY WENDY GROSSMAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 46 lines
Budget burials are driving into Hampton Roads this month in the back of a silver Ford minivan.
Without a hearse. Without a limousine. Without a funeral home or a chapel, Russell Harmon, president of Affordable Funeral Services, based in Vienna, Va., is offering a discount death.
Ian McCloskey, manager of the Tidewater branch, has set up the company's third branch on Great Neck Road in Virginia Beach. He'll drive to people's homes where at their dining room table they can peruse a catalog of caskets ranging from $395 for a pressed wood coffin to $3,395, which will buy one of mahogany or copper. ``Most people would prefer to look at caskets from a picture rather than going into a room of 15 or 20 around them,'' says McCloskey, 31.
And Harmon only marks up the caskets 25 percent, whereas many traditional funeral homes raise the price 100 percent to 300 percent, he says.
Dying in Hampton Roads can be pricey. The National Funeral Directors estimate the average funeral to be $4,600. In Hampton Roads the average is more than $5,000. McCloskey says his average price is $3,000.
Affordable Funeral is not a morgue-on-wheels. They won't embalm your loved one out in the driveway. They'll carry the body out to their van in a blue corduroy cover, have it embalmed, order the casket and arrange for a burial or cremation with or without the graveside service.
Among his notable clients: Harmon says he cremated J. William Fulbright, late senator from Arkansas, the man who founded London-based Cable & Wireless and an ex-congressman.
Debtless deaths have become a profitable market for Harmon. He started off making $4 an hour as a funeral director; now his company grosses about $300,000 a year. He founded the company in 1994 and opened a branch in Denver Sept. 1. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
Budget Burials
TAMARA VONINSKI
The Virginian-Pilot
Affordable Funeral Services is setting up a Virginia Beach branch.
Pictured are Russell Harmon, left, president of Affordable Funeral
Services, and Ian McCloskey, manager of the Tidewater branch.
KEYWORDS: FUNERALS by CNB