Paper, Plastic or Pinewood? — Wal-Mart’s Rolling Back Prices… for the Dead

Just when you think Wal-​Mart has cor­nered every mar­ket they start sell­ing these:

If I hadn’t seen this for myself I would not have believed it. Apparently Walmart is sell­ing Caskets and urns for peo­ple and pets on its Wal​-Mart​.com web­site. Here’s a video about this new ser­vice.

Here is some order­ing info from Wal​-Mart​.com on how to order one prop­erly:

You must con­firm the ship­ping address for cas­ket deliv­ery with your funeral home direc­tor. Often this address is dif­fer­ent from the funeral home itself. Enter the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion for the ship­ping address at check­out:

* First and last name: name of the deceased
* Company name: name of funeral home or mor­tu­ary
* Address: ship­ping address given to you by the funeral home direc­tor
* Phone num­ber: phone num­ber of the mor­tu­ary

Please see our Funeral Products Buying Guide and FAQs for more infor­ma­tion

Seriously this is an 11 page man­ual. Here are a few points from it.

Casket Sizes
Our stan­dard size cas­kets are 6′ 7″ x 2′ x 2′, and accom­mo­date most adults.

Oversize and cus­tom size cas­kets are also avail­able. Oversize cas­kets include Star Legacy’s “Generous Dimensions,” “Royal Star – Wide Body” and “Royal Star White – Wide Body”.

Also, you and your fam­ily can pur­chase:

Keepsakes
Keepsakes are minia­ture urns. They allow fam­ily mem­bers and friends to share a loved one’s remains as per­sonal heir­looms. If intern­ment, bur­ial or scat­ter­ing is cho­sen for the deceased, a keep­sake is a per­sonal way to remem­ber the indi­vid­ual.

Is it just me or is any­one else creeped out. It made me extremely uncom­fort­able to be sit­ting behind a com­puter screen view­ing cas­kets from Wal-​Mart. Also, what is even more eerie is how metic­u­lously Wal-​Mart planned the pur­chas­ing options out. So that means that it’s prob­a­bly not just some sea­sonal joke. Some indi­vid­ual at the Wal-​Mart cor­po­rate office said:

“I have an idea…let’s start sell­ing cas­kets and urns.”

And no one said, “You must be jok­ing. Get out! You fired!”

Has it really come to this? Are we really con­sumers in death? While I know that all of us will even­tu­ally one day make our final check­out (pun com­pletely intended) is this really the way we want to go out? One day will “cas­ket” be next to the eggs and milk on our shop­ping lists? Will we one day go in Wal-​Mart and see some teenager named Bobby Jr. lying in a cas­ket to help Grandma fig­ure out which size his Grandpa Jim will need? I don’t know about ya’ll but this has me seri­ously wor­ried.

If the day comes that I see Wal-​Mart adver­tis­ing it’s new human and live­stock birthing sec­tions or one stop adop­tion agen­cies (nat­u­rally babies and tod­dlers will be half off) I’m going some­where to hide.

What do you think about this? And what do you think Wal-​Mart will sell next?

Video Credit: http://​www​.weau​.com
Photo Credit: Walmart​.com

Thanks for read­ing,