America Says "Sardine Me!"
America Says "Sardine Me!"
By Joe Bob Briggs
January 31, 2003
Stop whining about cramped airline seats, lousy airline food, and spotty airline service.
You can have the biggest Lazy Boy recliner of an airline seat in the universe if you want it. You can crack that baby back into a horizontal position and snooze all the way from Chicago to Sydney. You can have champagne, sirloin and fresh-baked breakfast muffins if you want. You can fly direct, fly fast, and fly hassle-free.
You just have to, uh, pay for it.
The airlines don't scrunch everybody together because they have executive suites full of sadists. They don't serve freeze- dried granola bars because they're secretly conspiring with a cheesy frozen-dinner factory in Akron. They don't make you fly to Atlanta because they love the Braves.
The airlines have been painfully reminded--by you, the flyer--that the only thing you care about is the price of your ticket. You'll get on the Internet, see who has the lowest price between two cities, and book that flight without even asking how painful the seats are, what the food is like, or whether you might have to sit in the sports bar at O'Hare for two hours.
In Europe they have a completely different system. The big national airlines are mostly for business travellers. They're expensive. They're comfortable. They have all the amenities. When people go on vacation, they use cheap charter planes. They're flying sardine cans, but people don't care because they get the flight lumped in with their vacations.
Every time somebody's tried to start up a charter-vacation airline in America, using the European model, it's gone bust. Americans want to fly on the business plane at the tourist price. And when business travel takes a dip, as it did after September 11th, the American carriers become desperate for bodies, any bodies, and so they start discounting the seats and changing the prices every hour so they can make sure they get something-- twenty bucks, thirty--for that seat instead of watching it take off without a butt in it. They essentially become a cheap vacation airline--but they're flying equipment that costs a great deal more than the planes flown by Dieter's Carefree Moroccan Holiday Agency.
Are you following this?
The only thing that makes sense for the American airlines in today's market is to fly small cheap planes with hundreds of people shoe-horned into the seats, and fly each route just once or twice a day. Get rid of first class entirely. Get rid of business class. Cut back on food. Cut back on routes. Become more and more like . . . well . . . like Southwest Airlines.
Every fiscal quarter, when the depressing airline profit statements come out, we hear the same story. Every airline in America is hemorrhaging money and facing more cutbacks, layoffs and extensions of their already shaky credit. Except for one-- Southwest. (Actually, there's now another airline that makes money: JetBlue. It was built on the Southwest model.)
So why don't they all copy Southwest? Southwest not only has no first class, it has no assigned seats at all. They just load you in roughly in order of who gets to the gate first. They serve no meals, unless you call a gooey meat-stick and a congealed cheese patty to dip it in a meal. They have the smallest seats of any carrier, absolute kneecap-killers. Their planes are noisy and ugly.
And they had net income of $42.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2002. (By comparison, American Airlines, the largest carrier in the world, had a loss of $529 million in that quarter, and $3.51 billion for the whole year.)
Obviously the message from the American consumer is: "Sardine me! Sardine me!"
Yes, they'd like to have a comfortable seat--but it's not that important so long as they get a cheap fare.
Yes, they'd like to eat something--if they don't have to pay for it.
Yes, they'd like to avoid changing planes--but who cares how many times you change if it only costs a hundred bucks to get across the country?
Northwest, Delta and Continental--three other struggling airlines--announced last week that they'd be "code-sharing" in the future. In other words, you might book a Delta flight that turns out to be a Continental flight, or vice versa, because they're saying, "It's stupid for us both to fly that route with half-empty planes. Let's share it." So the plane can fly with 70 percent Delta passengers, 20 percent Northwest passengers, and 10 percent Continental passengers, and all three airlines get their proportion of the revenue.
Meanwhile, American did a whole ad campaign based around leg room. They took seats out of the planes to make the passenger more comfortable. (They failed to mention in the campaign, of course, that they'd added seats in the 1980s to make the passenger less comfortable.) And the result was: Who cares?
Look at it this way. There's a reason that Greyhound and Trailways and all the other bus lines have just about the same level of comfort and service--which is to say, not much. If someone started a new bus line called Luxury Coach, and used those special charter buses that corporations use for golfing trips and the like, no one would be that surprised if they filed for Chapter 11 after a year. When you buy the bus ticket, you're not thinking, "Wow, I could spend twice as much and have a swivel chair and a complimentary Diet Coke." You're thinking, "Wonder how long I have to spend on the goldang bus. I hope the guy drives fast."
Airlines are the same. We're a no-frills nation, unless the frills are free.
Eat your meat stick, and smile about it.
Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.
© 2003 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved