[rozab]

Pushing overpriced useless junk to emotionally vulnerable people? No. There is a necessary service of digging a hole and putting a corpse in a box into it, but the whole business of $10k coffins and embalming and such is both unnecessary and quite unique to the US.

[wutbrodo]

Expensive funerals are far from "unique to the US". The US spends substantially less as a proportion of income than Japan, China, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, and New Zealand, and is within a couple percent of a half dozen other countries.

[1] https://businesstech.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/S...

[rozab]

I did look this up and found slightly different numbers:

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/how-much-d...

https://nfda.org/news/statistics

But I would maintain that the invasive practice of embalming is unnecessary and unusual elsewhere in the world.

[wutbrodo]

I think those are consistent with the numbers I found

[floor2]

Ha, I think the internet needs a new term like Godwin's Rule or Gell-Mann Amnesia or whatever for the constant claims of "This only happens in America" or "This problem is worse in America than anywhere else" and then the reality is that the US is in line with averages or norms in other countries or cultures.

[tomatotomato37]

Can we also have one for "Europe does X better" where Europe really just means France, Scandinavia the wealthy half of Germany, and maybe UK, and not the more irreputable countries like Belarus or Serbia?

[wutbrodo]

Anything that's a cheap way to get midwit upvotes is an unsolvable problem as far as I can tell.