by CKR
I keep wondering about the airlines’ business model: Reduce service and amenities while raising prices; treat customers and employees as expendable; make access difficult; and tell everyone that this is for their own good and threaten to arrest them if they don’t agree.
To be fair to the airlines, they have built-in economic problems that go back to the days of regulation, and it’s partly the government that is making access difficult and threatening to arrest people. But has their managment not heard of overcoming obstacles? Of making lemons into lemonade?
Tom Friedman seems to be wondering the same thing about the United States.
There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next U.S. president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call.We need the airlines’ product, quick transit from one point to another, so we will be forced to work around reduced service and amenities and pay the increasing price to be treated as suspect terrorists. But Freedman points out that other nations are becoming capable of providing some of the services that have historically come from the United States.
I don’t have any easy solutions for either problem, but it might just be time for both the airlines and the American government to admit that their business models aren’t working.