Death-notice price gouging: Why?

Sure, newspapers are hard up, but exploiting bereaved families with exorbitantly priced death notices seems to be a distasteful and strategically inept way to try to make ends meet. I stumbled across the problem this week when I tried to buy a death notice in my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death