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As with any economic sector, the funeral industry is a social product that, through the process of institutionalization, has disguised its constructed nature to become, more or less, taken for granted by the public. However, despite common beliefs to the contrary, consumers do not need the funeral industry to dispose of their dead, and in many states bodies can be interred in one’s backyard after conducting a do-it-yourself funeral. The greatest portion of consumer spending in the funeral industry is, therefore, discretionary spending. Yet for over a century now, most Americans have accepted the role of the funeral industry as a natural part of the lifecourse. In reality, there is nothing intrinsically necessary supporting the existence of the funeral industry. Instead, it faces an ever-present crisis of legitimation which can be an implicit obstacle to expansion. Thus, one of the funeral industry’s most important creations is its own raison d’etre. In this paper I discuss “implosion,” or the ways formerly separate and distinctive social spheres break down to create a new commodity form (Baudrillard [1994] 2006, Ritzer [1999] 2005). Implosion legitimates discretionary service industries and makes the ongoing expansion of those industries possible. In the case of the funeral industry, the funeral can be a sacred ritual and a shopping ritual and a form of entertainment. More generally though, implosion allows industries to overcome many barriers to demand by expanding the reach of the commodity form. That is, implosion works through explosion—the explosion of the discursive relations between the buyer, the seller, and the commodity. The “imploded” commodity form creates the possibility of surplus meanings for the consumer by collapsing previously distinctive social spheres into a novel bricolage. The consumption of funerals, for instance, can entail more meanings and establish more relationships than ever before, whether those meanings and relationships exist between the buyer and her self, the buyer and the producer, the material good(s) she has purchased, other funeral attendees, the deceased, and so forth. Historically, the funeral industry has had to rely on external discourses to legitimate its goods and services, particularly public health and psychology. Implosion however, provides its own legitimation since the funeral industry’s identity deficit has been replaced with a surfeit of meanings. Nowadays the industry not only disposes of American consumers’ dead, it also sells them some recreation or entertainment to go with their sadness. It provides a delimited space for mourning as well as a space to throw a party, even as it manufactures the sacrosanct and the profane, tradition and novelty, and so on. Implosion therefore aids the legitimation of discretionary goods and services by creating new commodity forms. Here I highlight one in particular—the commodity gimmick. This is not meant to be an exegesis on Baudrillard’s conceptualization of implosion.[1] Instead, I use implosion as a heuristic through which to explore the ways in which use-less-ness gets ascribed a useand subsequent exchangevalue. I begin my discussion by summarizing the dominant claims around the relative value of commercialized funeral care as those claims have evolved through the history of the American funeral industry. These introductory remarks highlight the funeral industry’s legitimizing positions and the manner in which these positions have shifted over time. The purpose of presenting this historical piece is to demonstrate the mechanisms through which the industry has linked itself to other areas of expertise in the past and to suggest that the present turn to techniques of The Contribution of Implosion to the Exuberance of the Dead