Some
funeral directors reach for the brass casket. Vince Sharkey sees no shame in going
for the cardboard.While national chains are gobbling up independent funeral homes,
Sharkey has taken a huge bite out of their market locally, handling more bodies
at his All County Funeral Home in Lake Worth than any other home in Florida.
His secret?
He charges less -- a lot
less.
Competitors from the largest funeral home chains
in the world have been forced to deal with the Vince factor -- a phenomenon that
makes just about everyone else look overpriced by comparison.
The average basic service fee charged by funeral homes in Broward and Palm Beach
counties is $1,350. Sharkey charges $250. The simplest cremation averages $1,223
at other local homes. Sharkey's price: $300.
"Why
do I charge so much less? Why don't you ask them why they are so much more?"
Sharkey said. "There's really no need for funeral expenses to be as high
as they are."
Sharkey's machine owes its success to
a single word: volume.
Blunt-spoken and scrappy, Sharkey
learned the business as a teen-ager by helping out at a local funeral home. He
built All County in part by breaking one of the industry's unspoken rules: He
put his prices -- and sometimes his competitors' -- in his ads.
All County dwarfs the competition in Palm Beach County, grabbing 16 percent of
the market. No other individual home draws even 1 percent. Sharkey handled an
astounding 1,908 deaths in 1998, more than 80 percent of them cremations -- typically
the least expensive way to dispose of a loved one.
"He
is the leader in the low-cost funeral," said Bradford Zahn, owner of the
Tillman Funeral Home in West Palm Beach. "Not everybody likes him, because
his prices are so low."
Funeral directors all over
South Florida know about Sharkey, mostly because customers ask about the prices
in his many advertisements. Chain and independent directors alike view Sharkey
as a cut-rate operator.
"He gets bodies out of Miami
to (go to) Lake Worth. Why? Because of the price," said Joseph Scarano, owner
of Joseph A. Scarano Pines Memorial Chapel in Pembroke Pines. "They don't
care if he's in Alaska. He's cheap."
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(Mark Randall/Staff)
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Vince
Sharkey, of All County Funeral Home and Crematory in Lake Worth, broke ground
by printing his prices, the lowest in the area, in his advertisements.
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Take
a walk through Sharkey's showroom for a lesson on beating the competition to the
bottom line. He points out an item standing against his showroom wall.
It's the cheapest receptacle in which a body legally can be cremated. In the trade,
it's referred to as an "alternative minimum container." It's a cardboard
box.
At the competition, it can cost $100 or more. At Sharkey's,
it sells for $25.
Sharkey revels in tweaking the competition,
particularly the national chains.
"For the longest
time I was made fun of," he said. "Now it's become a real eye-opener
for them."
His competitors fight back by comparing
his service to a fast-food drive-through. Some wonder aloud how it's possible
for him to charge so little.
"He must be cutting corners
somewhere," said Julian Almeida, vice president of Palms West Funeral Home
in Royal Palm Beach and former general manager of the Service Corporation International
funeral homes in Palm Beach County (Dignity Memorial).
In an apparent attempt
to counter the Vince factor, funeral home giants SCI (Dignity Memorial) and Loewen Group have opened
discount operations only blocks away from All County.
Almeida
believes the chains are losing money with their low-price shops and are willing
to do it to cut into Sharkey's volume.
SCI (Dignity Memorial) even renamed
its long-established E. Earl Smith funeral home All Choice at E. Earl Smith, strikingly
similar to its popular neighbor.
Yet Sharkey's business
grows.
Almeida said it's impossible for traditional funeral
homes, which cater to all levels of clients, to match Sharkey's prices, because
they don't have the same volume of business.
Palms West
charges $945 for a no-frills cremation, competitive with most funeral homes --
but still three times what Sharkey gets.
"I can't
go any lower, or I wouldn't be in business," Almeida said.
Not content with his place in the low-end market, Sharkey opened a chapel called
Del Lago Chapel near his Lake Worth headquarters for the higher-profit part of the business
-- the full-service funeral. He handled 41 burials in 1998.
And even though it got him where he is, Sharkey protests his reputation as a cut-rate
funeral outlet store.
"I do the same exact thing as
they do," he said, "but for a lot less." |
