Buy One, Get One at Half Price

My wife came home from shopping one day and asked how I wanted to go.

I said, “Go where?”

She said, “You know, to the Great Beyond.”

I said, “New York?”

“What do you want done with your remains?” she said, becoming annoyed at the vaguedirection the conversation was taking.

“I’m not through with my remains yet.”

“Can’t you answer a simple question?” she demanded, raising her voice. “WHAT IN THE HELL DO YOU WANT DONE WITH YOUR BODY WHEN YOU’RE DEAD?!”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Surprise me.”

The subject made me uncomfortable. During much of my growing-up years, death was a word my mother wouldn’t let me use.

“If you say it,” she warned, “it will happen.”

It wasn’t until the sixth grade that I discovered it was going to happen whether I said it or not, but I still don’t like talking about it.

“I heard on the car radio that now is a good time to die,” my wife said. “You can buy caskets dirt-cheap, so to speak. Buy one, get one at half price.”

It was a commercial for a place called Direct Casket in Van Nuys. The idea simultaneously amused and intrigued her.

Together we are compulsive spenders, feeding each other’s inclination to buy at first sight. Had we both gone to Direct Casket we’d have probably come home with four of them, the price was so good: one for the dog to sleep in, one as a planter box and two to save for later use. So I went alone.

*

The business of selling coffins directly to the public began in 1994 when the Federal Trade Commission ruled that funeral homes could no longer charge extra fees to those buying their caskets elsewhere.

The FTC decision was a wake-up call (sort of) in the $10-billion death industry. It led to companies popping up everywhere to take advantage of the ruling, offering cut-rate bargains in their showrooms, over the phone and on the Internet.

Among them was Direct Casket. Its president is a happy, chubby, energetic young man who knows a good thing when he sees one. That would be Ray Silvas. I spent an afternoon with him.

“Here’s the best deal in the house,” he said enthusiastically as we meandered through a room full of coffins, their lids half open. “We call it the Harrison. It’s 16-gauge steel with a heavy velvet interior, champagne-toned inside and out. At $1,795 a bargain. You know what you’d pay at a funeral home?”

“Not a clue,” I said. It was my first time pricing caskets.

Silvas leaned in close. “Thirty-eight hundred.” He nodded in satisfaction. I almost expected him to hand me a set of keys and say, “Give ‘er a spin.” Side air bags and anti-lock brakes not included.

A casket called Going Home was also a sweet little number. “We bought it for my mother’s cousin when he died,” Silvas confided.

“The funeral home charged us $2,900. Here it’s $1,195.”

He showed me a casket named Traditional, another named Moses. There were also really cheap ones ($275 and $445) made of particleboard and cardboard named, oddly, Congressional and Pentagon.

“They’re mostly for those who want to be cremated,” Silvas said, clearly not interested in singing their praises. Like cars with dents and bad paint jobs, they didn’t represent the best of the industry.

*

The business of selling death isn’t an easy one, but Silvas, 31, is good at it. Listening to him, I could almost see the advantage of a nice brush-lacquered metal coffin with a crank-adjusted pillow and swing-bar handles. I am less certain about the casket that offers interior backlighting to better display its owner. I don’t think I want to be displayed.

Unlike the traditional concept of a coffin merchant, he is also a man with a sense of humor about what he does. “I could offer to sell you a 100-year warranty against rust,” he said, referring not to the body but to the coffin, “but who’s going to check?”

Silvas was born in East L.A., a fourth-generation Angeleno, and has been an entrepreneur since he was 16, when he founded his own cleaning service. He joined Direct Casket last July as head of the company’s West Coast operation.

“You can buy everything else in a store,” he said, as we sat in an office over the showroom, “why not a casket?”

He was politicized, Silvas says, when he discovered that the $6,500 coffin his family bought for his grandmother in 1994 could be purchased directly from a company for $2,200.

“Caskets are marked up 300 to 500% by funeral homes,” he said, obviously indignant. “Our markup is only 30 to 70%.”

Direct Casket will ship the box of your choice to a funeral home or you can store it in your garage until the appropriate time. Credit can be arranged or, with 50% down, one can opt for a layaway plan. Really.

“Customers are grateful to us,” Silvas said, handing me a press packet that included a cheerful yellow fan and a refrigerator magnet bearing an open casket. “We often get calls from them thanking us.”

“You get calls?” I couldn’t conceal my amazement. Cell phones in the Moses?

“From their loved ones,” he added. Oh.

The logic behind the current sale--buy one, get one at half price--is to encourage couples to plan in advance, Silvas explained, thus sparing their survivors the cost of buying coffins later.

He smiled the benevolent smile of a saint. “It’s a great gift to the kids,” he said.

Maybe so, but I think I’ll stick to perfume and neckties this year.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com