[Comevius]

This is similar to the crisis private business owners face when they are too old to run their businesses. Many owners want their children to take over, but they are either reluctant, incompetent or both. It's always a shit show, and the business is sold eventually to a bigger company. This is happening all over, but the funeral industry is especially affected these days. I guess because it's mostly family businesses that avoided consolidation for a long time, just no longer.

[coldpie]

There does seem to be this pattern of older people refusing to pass the torch until it's too late. I figure when you're in your last working decade (55~65), you ought to be focusing on finding new people to keep the train running and transferring knowledge and power on to them so you can exit the workforce and enjoy your retirement. Instead it seems many choose to hold on to every scrap of power until well after they're able to effectively pass things on, at which point there is no one prepared to pass things on to, leaving everyone involved miserable, including the owner, their employees, and their customers. I don't know if this is a generational thing, or just one of those properties of humanity.