In the newspaper business, politicians have long been considered to be poor credit risks. Many candidates plan to pay for their campaign with the money obtained after winning an election. When they don’t win, donors don’t contribute to the candidate’s campaign coffers and bills go unpaid. Consequently, politicians are often required to pay their bills in advance.
I’ve considered funeral homes to be good credit risks and have generally not required out-of-town funeral homes to prepay for purchases.
With the pandemic reducing this newspaper’s advertising sales, we have been trying harder to collect overdue bills. One of those bills was for a purchase made by an out-of-state funeral home.
Back in October they were mailed a collection notice. This week it was among the mailings returned as undeliverable.
The first envelope contained a nearly $500 check to a supplier we occasionally buy materials from. I searched for the company’s address and learned they had moved six years ago from Kentucky to Ohio. I was able to place my order by telephone and promptly got the requested merchandise but didn’t pay any attention to where it was shipped from. When writing and mailing the check to pay for the goods, I utilized an old address stored in my computer.
And so when five letters to the funeral home were returned this week, I suspected we had used the wrong address and went to the internet to search for a new address.
That search turned up some surprising information.
We learned the funeral home had been closed by the state regulators and the operators accused of improper practices. Authorities apparently found an unrefrigerated body, bags of unlabeled cremains, an abandoned stillborn infant and at least one instance in which a family received cremains for their stillborn child mixed with bits of adult body parts and metal fragments.
The licenses for at least two of the owners’ funeral homes were suspended by the state. Indications are the owners may have owned or had an interest in as many as six funeral homes The owners were arrested after an occupied casket was discovered inside one of the funeral homes. The deceased was identified as a 42-year-old male who was killed in a tractor-trailer crash in the summer of 2020.
Perhaps, the funeral homes should have been located inside of caves and taken advantage of natural cooling.
A couple weeks ago a sales representative I have done business with for more than 40 years advised the company she works for had been sold and moved to a new location. When I first began ordering from them, the business was located in a flood prone part of Kansas City, Missouri. Sometimes orders were delayed because the company office and warehouse had been flooded.
The company moved across the river to higher ground several years ago and flooding had not been a problem. The latest move surprised me.
Robin reported the company is now one of many in the Kansas City area located inside a limestone cave. I suspect the underground location is energy efficient. Hopefully it isn’t in a flood prone area.
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