There may be no harder time to make a purchasing decision than immediately after someone you love dies.

Yet that's exactly when Americans routinely make one of the larger purchases of their lives.

A family walks into a funeral home and, often within a single meeting, chooses transportation, embalming, a viewing, a ceremony, a casket, a burial vault, flowers and other services. The person guiding them through those decisions is providing an essential service. They're also making a sale.

That combination has made funeral homes one of the strangest businesses in America.

The sales process usually starts with what's called an "arrangement conference." A funeral director sits down with the family, gathers information about the deceased and walks them through their options.

The challenge is obvious: aggressively upselling someone whose parent just died would be both ethically questionable and terrible for the funeral home's reputation. Instead, funeral selling tends to revolve around presenting choices and helping families decide what feels appropriate.

Those choices can get expensive quickly.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, a casket is often the single most expensive item in a traditional funeral. An average casket costs a little over $2,000, while high-end mahogany, bronze and copper models can reach $10,000.

And there's an interesting piece of sales psychology involved.

The FTC notes that industry studies have found the average casket buyer chooses one of the first three models shown, usually the middle-priced option. That creates an obvious incentive for a seller to begin with more expensive models.

Caskets historically provided attractive merchandise margins, but funeral-home economics are more complicated than simply buying a box wholesale and marking it up. A funeral home has significant fixed costs: a building that may sit mostly empty during parts of the week, specialized vehicles and equipment, licensed employees, insurance, preparation facilities and staff who need to be available when a death occurs.

Funeral homes therefore also charge for services. There may be separate charges for transporting the body, preparing it, using the funeral home for a viewing, holding the ceremony, providing a hearse and conducting a graveside service. There's also a basic services fee covering things such as planning, permits, paperwork, sheltering the remains and coordinating with cemeteries and crematories.

For decades, however, consumers had relatively little idea what they actually had to buy.

That changed substantially with the FTC's Funeral Rule, which took effect in 1984.

Funeral homes must provide consumers with an itemized General Price List when discussing arrangements in person. They must disclose that embalming isn't always legally required and that consumers generally can select individual goods and services rather than purchasing everything offered. Funeral homes also cannot refuse—or charge an extra handling fee for—a casket purchased somewhere else.

That last provision created an unusual competitive problem.

A family can buy a casket online and have it delivered to the funeral home. The funeral director legally can't say, "If you don't buy the casket from us, we won't handle it."

Cremation has further changed the economics. A family choosing direct cremation doesn't need a traditional casket at all. Funeral homes offering cremation must make alternative containers available, which can be made from materials as simple as fiberboard or cardboard.

There's another side of funeral sales that's considerably more like conventional selling: pre-need sales.

Instead of meeting a family immediately after a death, funeral homes can sell arrangements to people years beforehand. Customers decide what they want, document their wishes and, depending on the arrangement, may prepay. Suddenly the sales conversation isn't taking place during a crisis. It's a prospecting and planning business.

That creates one of the industry's biggest advantages: death isn't exactly a market that's going away.

But consumer preferences are changing, and funeral homes increasingly have to compete on price, convenience and services rather than simply selling an expensive traditional burial.

Which leaves funeral directors with an unusually difficult sales job.

They have to generate enough revenue to keep a business operating while serving customers on one of the worst days of their lives.

There probably isn't another sales meeting where reading the room matters quite as much.