A tisket, a tasket, a Warby Parker of caskets.

Every time I turn around, there's another buzzing entrepreneur just dying to disrupt some industry or other. 

Nothing new here. There've been disrupters as long as there's been an industry to disrupt.

Henry Ford disrupted the horse wagon business. Jeff Bezos disrupted book stores. Uber's Travis Kalanick disrupted taxis. Mark Zuckerberg disrupted matchmakers. Warby Parker is going after eyeglass shops. 

And now Scott Ginsberg, after two decades peddling caskets to Massachusetts funeral homes, is hoping to "upend the funeral business" by selling caskets online.

So he co-founded Titan Casket — which bills itself as “the Warby Parker of caskets” after the hip online eyewear business — selling caskets directly to consumers, cutting out funeral home middlemen, and saving people hundreds of dollars to bury their loved ones.

“Funeral homes enjoy a 200 to 400 percent markup” on casket sales, he said. “I thought to myself, ‘There is got to be really a better way than this.’ I mean, really, this industry really hasn’t changed in over 100 years. And most people don’t shop funerals.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Sorry, Scott, but there've been others at the casket disrupter game for a while. Way back in the way back, in 2009, I posted about Walmart's casket and urn offerings. And in 2006, when my mother-in-law was dying, she asked me to do some online research on ordering a DIY casket kit for her. (Don't ask.)

Personally, I don't plan on ever needing a casket - I'm strictly a cremation kind of gal - and, while I have a small urn with a small amount of my husband's ashes in it, all of my ashes will be buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery or scattered in a few spots. Which, other than hanging on to a few, is exactly what I did with Jim's.

With or without me, with or without Walmart, it looks like Titan is doing alright for themselves. 

Today, Titan claims to be the largest seller of caskets on Amazon, and sells on other online platforms, including Costco and Sam’s Club. Its own direct-to-consumer website offers everything from simple pine boxes for $800 to “the ultimate in luxury,” “fully featured,” Era stainless steel model for $2,000.

And with or without Titan, the funeral business is changing. The traditional two-day, 2-4 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. wake of my youth, followed by a funeral the next day, has already been cut back to a one evening wake 4-8 p.m.  - which my brother Rich calls "the fabulous four" - plus funeral. Sometimes it's even just a quickie morning-of wake the day of the funeral. In obituaries - and, yes, I do read them on occasion - I often see "burial will be at the convenience of the family." Which means that people are doing away with the trip from church to the cemetery. 

And then there's all the folks who've been doing their own thing for a while. (We had a memorial service for my husband a month afer his death: a wonderful secular celebration of Jim's life, held in a Unitarian church, and a party to follow.)

Covid, of course, has put a further pall on traditional funerals.

Still, although funerals ain't what they used to be, I was a bit shocked by the comments of of one Louis Tobia Jr. "whose family ran the New England Casket Company for three generations until a fire closed its East Boston factory in 2019."

“People are looking for alternative ways to have a funeral and really trying to get a bang for their buck,” Tobia said. “Cremation is much more prevalent than it was 10 years ago, so people don’t find a value in a traditional burial, casket, and a wake. I think people just want to get it done and over with for the cheapest price they can get it at this point.”

I think people just want to get it done and over with for the cheapest price.

Wow. 

I'm no traditionalist, and I didn't hold a wake for my husband (other than the get together after the memorial service and the quasi-shiva I sat in the week after Jim's death), yet - whatever you end up doing when someone you love dies - there's a reason why there are rituals associated with death. It honors the dead and, more important, it gives people something to hang on to, something to focus on, something to do, when they're going through those first days of raw and palpable grief. It gets you through. And I'm all for it.

As for Warby Parker, when it comes to glasses, I've gone for many years to a small indie eyeglass store in downtown Boston. But this fall, since my niece Caroline was helping me pick out something more hip and happening than my norm, and since she does Warby Parker, and since their store - and, yes, they do have some brick-and-mortar business - was more convenient for Caro, I shopped at

Warby Parker. 

I like the new glasses, and they did cause less than I normally pay, but they weren't "brand name", either. (By the way, they're a lot more green than they look in the picture.)

I've been getting lots of complements, but I'm not sure if I'll be back to Warby or return to my old guys.

Am pretty sure I'll never be casket shopping at Titan, or anyplace else for that matter.