Word: loewen
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...mortuaries still bore the name Riemann, and his sons Mike and David still managed the business. Hearses came and went trailing the usual plumes of sorrow. Outwardly, in fact, nothing seemed to have changed at all, except the Riemanns' announcement that they had taken on a new "partner," the Loewen Group, a "death-care" corporation based just outside Vancouver, Canada...
...many lay people would have recognized the name, since relatively few ordinary citizens read the publications of the funeral industry--with their ads for Eterna-Cribs, Frigid Fluid body bags, Velvetone Arterial solution and Hydrol Tissue Builder--in which Loewen and its competitors had long been subjects of debate. O'Keefe, however, knew Loewen and knew full well it was no mere partner. "That was a lie and a subterfuge," he says. When Loewen went on to buy another nearby funeral home and in the process intruded on a long-standing contract between that home and O'Keefe, O'Keefe...
With little fanfare, the Loewen Group and a handful of other large death-care companies are racing to buy up as many independent funeral homes as possible--not out of any desire to share the resulting economies of scale and cut the cost of funerals but rather to boost prices still higher. The death-care companies seek to ready themselves for what stock-market analyst Steve Saltzman of the Chicago Corp. calls the "golden era" of death, the fast-approaching epoch when baby boomers begin dropping like flies. The Loewen Group is the second largest of the "consolidators," and over...
...seems, the news for consumers could get worse. In September, SCI, dogged by Loewen at every turn, launched a hostile bid to seize control of its foremost rival and increase its dominance of the death business in key U.S. markets. Yet despite the likely repercussions, the threatened takeover has drawn scant popular attention--chiefly because the consolidation of the industry has so far occurred, by design, well out of public view. The Loewen-O'Keefe story, however, provides a look at just what an SCI-Loewen combination could hold in store for future next...
...that nothing is being done now, but rather that much much more could and should be done if, as Loewen said, "Harvard's imagination could be stirred...