Calculated Misery - what a way to view your customers - Granite Grok

Calculated Misery – what a way to view your customers

Airline ticketAnd I thought I had a problem with FairPoint?  As a former frequent flier, I am SO glad my longest biz trip lately is from the kitchen to my home office and that airports are not in my immediate future as they used to be (a weekly affair):

Over at The New Yorker, Tim Wu identifies the two little, insidious words that explain why airlines have made flying more and more awful: calculated misery. 

Perhaps you didn’t realize there was a name for the way that the airlines nickel and dime travelers, but if you’ve flown lately, then you know all about the effects of this economic strategy. Unless you’re a devotee of Southwest Airlines, the good old days of free checked bags are pretty much gone. But it’s not just bags: The airlines now extract huge amounts of cash by degrading the basic flying experience and then charging fees for priority boarding, slightly better economy seats, paid in-flight Wi-Fi, and other features that make the flying experience something less that totally unbearable. Delta and United each made more than a billion dollars in 2014 just from rebooking fees. Wu writes:

“In order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.”

Teleportation technology can’t come quickly enough.  But let’s be honest – we told them to do this to us.  As consumers, the airlines have been told millions of times that the cheapest prices win, most of the time by the vast majority of us.   “Good, cheap, fast – pick two and call me in the morning” – and fliers have said “get me there fast and get me there cheap”.  Odd man out is “Good”.  Good costs more and good is slower – and it seems that is what most ticket purchasers have said no to.

(H/T: Popular Mechanics)

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