Spiking costs from import duties and surging cremation rates leave small businesses that sell headstones and other memorials in critical condition.

BY BRUCE CRUMLEY @BRUCEC_INC

Photo: Getty Images

Owners of small companies that sell graveside memorials like headstones accept the tough reality of dealing with death as a central part of their business. Now, however, many leaders of those often decades-old, family-owned companies are facing an existential threat themselves. The combination of rising costs created by import tariffs, and falling demand as more people opt for cremation over traditional burial could prove fatal to many.

The increasingly tough struggle of businesses that make and sell gravestones, statues, and other cemetery memorials was examined in a recent CNBC report titled, “An industry focused on death faces an existential crisis.” Central to the dilemma the owners of those hundreds of small companies face is the rising cost of granite used for graveside monuments. According to Jim Milano, the Cleveland-based proprietor of Milano Monuments,

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