Welcome to Grim Yelp Reviews, a new regular feature where we share people’s worst experiences at the worst places. This week: death, the ultimate one-star experience.
Funerals, like writing online reviews of goods and services, are for the living. The dead don’t care that the funeral director was late, they don’t care the hearse had a dented fender, and they don’t care that the cemetery was closed for lunch. (Seriously. Who knew?)
But the living care a whole lot, as you might expect. Yelp reviews of funeral homes tend to be either glowingly positive (“Thank you for being there in our time of loss”), or, you know, horrifying stories of indifference, incompetence, or downright ghoulishness. (There are also plenty of positive reviews that are obviously, entertainingly fake: “[Redacted] is set to become a big player in the funeral industry!” Yes. Just what a grieving widow would write.)
Obviously, grim Yelp reviews of funeral homes are entirely about funeral home staff and amenities. They can roughly be divided into five categories: not giving a shit, trying way too hard to collect on the bill, actual incompetence, actively being a dick, and incredibly morbid mistakes.
As always, to protect the names of the innocent and not-so-innocent alike, we’ve redacted the names of the businesses, as well as the identities of the Yelpers who wrote the reviews. We realize you can probably find out all of that information by employing five seconds of Google magic. Let’s dive right in, and never forget that death waits for each of us, lol.
Not Giving a Shit
Like, really not giving a shit:
ZERO STARS, [Redacted] is the most unprofessional funeral director in the State of New York. I seen him totally ignore a family after a funeral mass, while he talked on his cell phone. Family’s that are looking for a caring funeral home should go anywhere but here.
“Closed for lunch,” huh:
It’s not that they made the procession from the church to the cemetery such a nightmare in so many ways, or that they sort of ruined the last song of the funeral, or that even their attire was disrespectful around the edges, or how rushed and perfunctory the burial was, how bad their timing was, etc. — the problem is that their basic priority was to get the funeral done as quickly as humanly possible, get paid, and get out. And that priority was patently obvious in the ways they neglected to take even the most basic actions to make the funeral proceed smoothly. Really, even to call the trip from the church to the cemetery a “funeral procession” is giving the funeral home way too much credit. They just basically took off with the body and everybody had to scramble to follow them or catch up later. When they left, people were still inside the church! And still had to scrape snow and ice off the cars. They provided No flags for the cars, no funeral home person picking up the rear, no organization of any kind — and they were rushing to get to a cemetery that was, I kid you not, closed for lunch (so why were we in such a damn rush???)
I’m not sure it matters what kind of bar it is, but that does sound bad:
[Funeral home] hires pseudo actors that pretend and con their way into your pocket books and sign debt loads that will give them a steak dinner and a night’s outing at some gay bar. Understand?
And finally, from a woman whose religious beliefs dictated a speedy burial and a funeral home that gave the least possible shit there could be:
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