SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers
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This is why it is a good idea to be nice to the people you deal with on the front lines, and write a very politely worded letter to the head of the department at the company you are dealing with, and potentially letters to their boss, and their boss, etc. Mail it, if possible, as a follow-up to the email. I am sure people here need no instruction on how to find the appropriate person in the corporate structure to contact with their concern. These are the people who can get things done -- not just for you, but for everyone. Oh, don't forget that if you have a 401k you may legitimately be a stockholder in the company, so you can mention that if true.
For example, Southwest.
https://www.southwest.com/html/contact-us/index.html?clk=GFO...
Write us
Have extra stamps? Send us a letter.
P.O. Box 36647-1CR
Dallas, Texas 75235
Manager - XYZ airport customer support
c/o Southwest Airlines
P.O. Box ...about 20 years when I worked as a 3rd party vendor in a Big Box retailer I had contact with many Regional Managers, they all had public ways to contact them, and those contacts where read, and if a customer complaint was it issue it would be sent to store manager given high priority
Most people think like you do, "they are so big so they don't care" and depending on the reasonableness that may be true, I saw some really crazy things in my time (people always angling for free shit) but honest issues where dealt with.
You don’t. You write a generic letter and copy their regulators. If you’re nice, you give them a heads up over e-mail with the threat super explicit.
Stop going to the place that treats you badly, and if possible write an honest critical review of them. This is not perfect, but it has more hope of getting attention than a letter to an executive who almost certainly won't even see it.
For better or worse, people vote with their wallets. There are lots of low cost versions of things I would never even consider (and any experience would have me running to write an unfavorable review) but there are lots of people who care most about cost. It's the reason why southwest exists in the first place.
There are absolutely people that care in many organizations, if you can find them. Usually searching for "ombudsman" or "corporate secretary" will lead you in the right direction.
Some do.
A few years ago I flew with $EAST_ASIAN_AIRLINE and had some complications with my checked baggage. The gate agent was courteous and patient in understanding and resolving my issues. After everything's sorted out, she gave me the typical "if you're satisfied with my service, please write or call ..." As the interaction was positive, and I've got nothing else to do on the flight, I wrote a brief e-mail expressing my satisfaction with the earlier service.
Maybe a week later, I received a reply stating that they were pleased that I had good service, and said gate agent would be commended. Of course I have no way of telling for sure, I don't believe that it's a canned automated response, given that it was sent days later, the reply's formatting's simple, and that the reply's grammatically correct but stilted.
In contrast, I flew with $US_AIRLINE last year, in first class. I went to the airport early and requested if I could be re-booked for an earlier flight. The agent "helpfully" re-booked me, but in economy. It was clear that the agent had overlooked that I was flying first class. It couldn't be re-booked and I got a look of "well it's not my fault and you shoulda told me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" Fine, I thought, but at least I still get express security lane and lounge access, right? I was assured that they'll call ahead so there shouldn't be any problem. That turned out to be a lie. The security agent didn't know what I was talking about when I got there. Same deal when I try to enter the lounge, but I guess the lounge agent took pity on me and "did me a favor" -- not "I apologize for the errors so far, and this is the least I could do" -- and let me into the lounge at least.
I should emphasize that at no point did I raise my voice nor disrespect the agents I'd spoken to, though by the time I was at the lounge I probably did sound slightly upset.
There was no WiFi on that flight, but you bet I wrote a lengthy complaint when I got home. I didn't even get an automated response back.
> Stop going to the place that treats you badly [...]
I agree that's likely the most effective approach. I no longer fly with $US_AIRLINE unless I absolutely have to.
I've not had a bad interaction with SWA thus far, and was in fact planning on flying with them sometime in February. Perhaps I should reconsider, but the alternative would be $$$ more expensive (and I may have to fly $US_AIRLINE), so I might still risk it. That's the rub, isn't it: when it comes down to it airline passengers, including myself, are quite price sensitive, so it's totally rational for airlines to optimize that over everything else.
Sounds like you live in a different world from most of us. In our world, complaining loudly on the Internet, whipping up an outrage is often the only way out; there are daily examples on this very forum.
Local Dunkin behaving badly (my recent experience)? Just stop giving them my business. I can make my own coffee. I can also stop drinking coffee altogether. I don’t need them, and they demonstrated they don’t need me either.
There is too much bad behavior around - it is not worth one’s time and energy trying to fix them all
Also, if you're in the US, it might seem futile, but you do have elected officials and a massive government bureaucracy that tracks all this. Include them on the email if it necessitates it. Every email or letter has to be recorded, by law, so, if it's ever needed as evidence in something, it exists.
All the service bars in the first terminal have ipad style devices in front of the seats displaying a QR code. The expectation is that you scan the QR code off the ipad, and order using your phone/etc! Then pay with the ipad, which actually pissed me off more than sitting in the terminal for 8 hours while my flight was delayed in 10 min chunks. Initially I was unaware what was going on, and just sauntered up to a free spot on the bar, and tried to order a drink. Bartender explains that I have to use one of the ipads, which I shrugged and was like, ok, but then largely stared blankly at because it had a couple buttons (pay, order water, play games, etc) none of which were "order food/drinks/etc". Gave up when told that the bartender couldn't just serve me, and that the ipad thinngy couldn't take my order. WTF, kind of crazy nonsense is it to populate POS style terminals at every table, then fail to be able to order from them? Not only that apparently every single restaurant/etc is owned/using the same crap system so there isn't a choice to just go to the bar without.
Anyway, I got lucky because the SW captain grabbed a crew that still had hours and were suppose to be spending the night at my destination and told them they were working his plane...
Which itself was crazy, I'm pretty shocked that SW still doesn't have an automated system that "heals" the route network/etc when something like this goes wrong, and then sends updates to the flight crews/etc in question. You would think that after 2016 (when the exact same thing happened) they would have hired a couple "hackers" to just make it work...
The cherry on top was when I walked to one of the self-checkout stores, grabbed a bag of chips, scanned it myself, and was then prompted for a tip....at a self-service kiosk.
That is called 'cash back', isn't it?
They do, it is commercial program from the 90's they have customized, when more than 300 cancellations hit that system it fell over and could not recover. It also requires human operators to read the crew changes over the telephone so every crew member has to call into a call center to get new assignments. No online portal or mobile app.
The other thing it complains about is cutting costs. Well, Southwest has the cheapest air fares. You don't get top flight customer service when you buy the cheap seats. Customers have shown that they prefer lower prices to better service. They voted with their dollars.
McDonald's has replaced their cashiers with a kiosk. There's still a cashier there, but most of the customers (including me) prefer the kiosk because (at least in my case) it's faster.
The other day I went to a full service restaurant with a friend. Two burgers and a couple drinks went for $130. The restaurant was mostly empty, with more staff than customers. I don't think they're going to last.
There are times I actually enjoy not looking at any type of screen and having a nice meal is one of those times.
I cant wait until they open one of their fully automated places near me. I will be the first one through that line
Something definitely changed with the new CEO because the usually happy workers were much less so. For instance, they used to have somewhat unique and entertaining scripts for the flight education before takeoff, but for the past few years they stick to the boring version the other airlines deliver.
Maybe there’s something else going on, and my observation is wrong, and it’s all a combination of shitty managers and outdated software
The summary is that Herb Kelleher (CEO until 2004) was operations-focused, he was replaced by Gary Kelly who had a finance background and appointed as COO someone with a similar background. Kelly retired early 2022 and was replaced by Bob Jordan, getting back to an operations focused leader. Alas, the operational neglect of Kelly's tenure wasn't quickly overcome.
They haven't had "cheap" fares for a while nor have their staff had the quirky friendliness I had seen on flights when I started flying with them some 15 years ago.
The US domestic airline industry a patient that's always on life-support and pretty much upheld by government bailouts and bankruptcies at this point. I've probably mentioned it here before but the first chapter of David Dayen's "Monopolized" covers some of the sources of the issues going on there. It's a bad mix for something that has become important infrastructure, especially since we have no redundancy on the ground with something like rail traffic.
I've noticed as well that in grocery-store lines. Where customers are being conditioned to patiently wait in long lines to be next at the checkout machines. To wave their purchases over lasers, then pack them into each and every bag they'll pay for. Be careful what you put in the bagging area! the machines' metallic voices shriek at the customers. They must do exactly as they're told. Or else the single human attendant will walk over to ask them what they did wrong. While others still waiting trade impatient glances. Oh the shame.
Meanwhile the silent rows of unmanned registers wait in the gloom, just in case. Are they waiting for an EMP?
Man I just realized I have not been inside of a grocery store in over 3 years... Thank god for curb side pickup
For my everyday meals One pack of chicken is no different than the next pack of chicken...
One 5lb bag of potatoes is no different than the other 5lb bag of potatoes, 1 bag of onions is no different than the other bag of onions..,.. etc
I use it because it's always faster than the cashier lines unless those are empty, which they never are.
If I'm only getting a few things I'll use the self checkouts, this store doesn't use the scales to weigh the "bagging area" so it's as easy as scanning the items, Apple Pay and away I go. As an autistic person I much prefer this experience to having to awkwardly stand and make small talk with a cashier.
Yup. Just like the classic experiment on rats where they start introducing stresses into the environment (increased crowding, reduced food, noise, etc.) and the rats start fighting each other. Here's it is letting the customers fight the customer service reps, who are themselves deliberately understaffed.
Maybe time to using LinkedIn and other sources to find the higher level managers executives and start letting them hear the complaints directly in their inbox.
What apparently happened to Southwest is that their flight crew scheduling created schedules in which a delay at one point resulted in no crew being available at a second point, which allowed cascading failures. As a cost-saving measure, they don't have enough reserve crews to cope with disruptions.
If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all!
Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead.
Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs".
I have never seen customer service come up during a purchasing discussion outside of large corporate purchases. It's pretty firmly a "cost center" that MBAs try to optimize into being as cheap as possible. It is simply cheaper to outsource your support and make it obtuse/difficult to reach a person, basically only fulfilling the absolute bare minimum to not get sued.
I have, however, encountered phone systems that make it literally impossible to talk to a person.
Tracfone also decided it should be possible to activate this feature using just your phone number and a credit card, without having to sign into the website. There wasn't even a way for customers to sign into anything!
Years later, they added a possibility of customers signing into an online account. But doing so did not give access to payment information enter in the old no-sign-in system. The call-in help number's menu system also got changed sometime, such that it was no longer possible to talk to a person — all permutations of the menu tree, as well as fallbacks like "just press zero a few times" resulted in loops.The mandated contact number for the vendor on credit card bills also went to this menu system.
The end result was that the only way to modify or cancel a recurring payment created under the old no-sign-in system seemed to be telling the credit card company to either refuse charges from Tracfone or to close the revolving account. Doing so would cause Tracfone to cancel your service (which might not be what either you or Tracfone wanted).
And after they cancelled? The remnants of Tracfone automation would do two things: send your now-disabled phone occasional messages trying to entice you back, and keep submitting charges to the credit card company to be rejected. When the credit card's refuse-charges instruction expired after five years, Tracfone would resume taking payment, for a now unrecoverable (already reassigned) phone number, for an IMEI that had not appeared any network for years.
On the upside, I know somebody who has no problems with current Tracfone.
Most people don't think about customer service or support when they are buying stuff.
Actually solving the customers problem is way down the list of objectives for most phone systems. It's easy to see this by comparing the quality of phone support with the kind of market power a company has.
If you use the free option, the no support is given which is fair, you're not a customer
FWIW, google is better positioned to give shitty support because their users are the product anyway, and they grew organically into this. Support was never really part of the bargain (incidentally why I would never take google seriously for "business" services like gsuite or gcp because it's just not their culture).
The more egregious examples are companies like uber (probably the worst) that actually have customers but think they can treat them as badly as google treats its users because it's a "tech" business. And you end up with supposedly "disruptive" businesses that just amount to "we're cheaper because we're self serve and don't offer support (and ignore laws)". But returning to your point and mine, the first step is "blitz-scaling" yourself a de-facto monopoly so you can get away with treating people badly.
Why? And how would they know?
Customer service is a thing that maybe 10% of customers will interact with, and usually long after the product is purchased. It's very hard to evaluate up-front except through "brand" reputation.
If you end up needing to call someone since you've exhausted all other avenues you do want to talk to someone.
At that point you will either:
- waste a lot of time navigating prompts until you give up or reach a human.
- automated call center will decide that prompt it gave you is the correct one and close your call... (had this happen a lot...)
- automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close...
And all metrics will show great for the company while you've given up or you start looking for other companies.
Sure, lots of problems are solved by pointing to correct manual... although that would be an argument if product is user friendly enough.
Now... on southwest airlines case... what manual could you look up to fix your cancelled flight?, how do you deal with that?
Personally, I have had a cancelled flight on vacation. I could not find someone to talk to, automated prompts and calls closed. I booked another airline flight home and asked for a refund and compensation after the fact... This might not be an option in a lot of cases.
I usually just talk complete nonsense to these prompts (but valid English sentences). That way the automation gives up when it can parse the sentences but can’t intuit meaning from them.
On the other hand, calling a bank and saying you'd like to report fraud to the prompt directs you really fast to customer support.
Not all products/services offer customers (or end users) a choice. Government, wired ISP, and health insurance are usually not a choice.
A lot of times, mobile network and airline are effectively without choice too.
> If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all!
If a company's phone tree can make the consumer drop the call, it saves the company support worker time, regardless of whether the customer request was adequately served.
For a company, the tradeoff where customer may be on the line for 10 hours in a call tree to get an answer a their question, or 10 minutes with a support agent, is fairly easy if you do not care about support.
Phone trees do not automagically save anyones time, and especially not that of the customer.
Do you have any evidence for that claim? It seems unlikely that could be true since people need to call for things like repairs which a manual couldn’t help with and the intersection of people who don’t read manuals but will read them when prompted seems to leave out a lot of other people.
> If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all!
> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead.
This is leaving out a lot of obvious alternatives: products don’t fail often enough that people buy anything but the cheapest one (or the one that is featured more prominently in the store they have a promotional agreement with), companies have all cut their support staff so the ability to shop around is limited, the cost is shifted to the retailers or installers, some fraction of people give up and ask a friend or neighbor to help, etc.
> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual.
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. It's a strategy to try to get you to go online, use an automated system, or annoy you until you give up. Trust me, if I'm calling into a business something has already gone horribly wrong. The automated line lying about "higher than normal call volume" (bullshit, hire more people) or "You can find the answers you need on our website" (nope, that's why I'm calling in) only pisses me off. It has never in my life provided information that I found useful.
> If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all!
What does this even mean? Of course understaffing saves the company money.
> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead.
Yes, because I have a real choice on what electric, gas, water, internet company I use /s. For non-monopoly companies (growing increasingly rare) I often can't help that I currently have their product, I might buy an alternative (if one exists) next time around but "vote with your dollars" doesn't really work here well.
> Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs".
No, it's not. It might be a metric for human workers but they literally don't care if it takes you 10x longer to find the answer as long as they don't have to pay a human it's a win. I've worked for companies with call centers and I assure you the only thing they care about is reducing that headcount, the outcome for the customer doesn't even rank.
However, the users that represent the vast majority of support calls are very clearly not you.
This is ok.
“Thanks for calling $corp, press 1 to pay a bill or 2 to give us a 5 star rating. Press 3 to hear these options again.”
The less connected you are to a real person, the more true this is. Email is the worst. If you include any detail remotely atypical, they will latch right on to it. It's not like writing a ticket where if you include everything you think might be relevant, it will be appreciated and used to troubleshoot in good faith. It's more like they're building a case against you and any extraneous information you include will be used to achieve a summary judgement against you.
(I've had lots of great customer service experiences with smaller businesses and startups, over email and phone calls, but for giant organizations it's a terrible, adversarial process that often doesn't resolve my issue.)
> If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all!
> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead.
That assumes that there is a choice. Often enough there isn't. Just like there often enough isnt really competition. We have seen how "compeditors" have colluded to keep wages low before (the "gentlemens agreements between apple, Google etc execs). Funnily enough these agreements are never done to keep exec salaries down, might have something to do with the fact that they all sit on the same boards.
> Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs".
Evidence required. I suspect the systems are actually designed for customers to just give up. This is especially obvious in services which customers only use rarely and thus price becomes the main purchase factor. Take airlines, which probably are the worst in terms of call wait times, people do not buy tickets enough to make purchase decisions based on service when something goes wrong, so service is atrocious, except for business customers and frequent flyers, who typically get significantly better service.
people steal stuff so freely because they don't get prosecuted or punished.
and they do it in the first place because they can sell the stuff and buy meth. they 100% aren't worried about gentrification issues or the local economy, etc.
> and they do it in the first place because they can sell the stuff and buy meth. they 100% aren't worried about gentrification issues or the local economy, etc.
People also steal stuff increasingly because they need it and cannot afford it. In the past few years thefts of things like groceries and diapers have shot up. It's depressing, really.
you will not starve (or kids have no diapers) in this country simply because you refuse to steal. it's a really bad choice, and yes I do understand that people make bad choices. it's redeemable and understandable, but it's not excusable.
and yes! it's completely depressing!
People don't often steal diapers because they need them.
https://consumerist.com/2012/10/26/diapers-are-apparently-th...
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/retail-crime-ring-s...
https://www.wearegreenbay.com/news/local-news/two-arrested-i...
> The black market for diapers and other baby products thrives because so many people can’t afford over-the-counter prices for them. Diapers and wipes cannot be purchased with food stamps or other welfare benefits, and the expense is a grinding source of stress for families in poverty. During the pandemic, the number of families who couldn’t pay for diapers shot up across the country.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-...
People are just smart enough to know that if they do not have a badge, then they should not get involved unless they want to take on a lot of legal liability. It has nothing to do with how much Walmart staff cares about theft.
But pointing to automation as a problem is misguided. Automation is great. I look forward to a future when we don't subject humans to "time off task" in an Amazon warehouse. We automate a bunch of things now that were horrible for the people who originally did them.
The problem is systemic: how do we distribute the fruits of that labor? The current capitalist organization of the economy exploits labor and concentrates all the wealth in the hands of a small handful of people.
The US has and produces enough wealth such that every citizen could have enough to eat, a house to live in, access to healthcare and otherwise have all their basic needs met. We, as a society, have decided we'd rather have people die in the streets, starve and use state violence in the form of withholding basic healthcare like insulin.
Automation should mean that we only need to work 10-20 hours of work a week. But no. Instead we just cut the amount of workers (to the point of having no redundancy like the railroad companies) and suppress real wage increases in the name of increased profits.
It really doesn't have to be this way.
Has anyone else noticed how every single service call you make now has a (I suspect permanent) voice message saying "we are experiencing higher call volume than normal". If volumes are continuously higher than normal, then they're are the "new normal" and companies must adjust accordingly. (Edit: I see this is in fact mentioned later in the article; hadn't gotten that far yet).
> More and more consumers are being pushed away from humans onto automated systems we are told will “save us time,” but instead exist solely to save the corporation labor costs. ... The waiter hasn’t been replaced by an iPad, they’ve been replaced by you.
When faced with an automated system I always just press 0 continuously in the hope that it will break the cycle and get me through to a human rather than wade through their garbage system and answer a bunch of prompts only to have to repeat it all again when I finally get to an actual human (since I have yet to find one of those automated systems actually able to solve my query).
You know I think in the current business environment there is zero confidence in what the new normal is actually going to be. I don't think businesses like credit card issuers want to make people hold for a long time but I do think they are terrified of spending big bucks onboarding a lot of call centre staff and then having volumes drop off. And they honestly may not think they can afford the level of staffing required to bring wait times down in the long run and are grasping for technological solutions (that either don't work or are not mature enough to be effective).
As a farmer I certainly feel a bit paralyzed by the "new normal" - are these high commodity prices here to stay? High input costs? Am I facing decade or so of high-cost/high-margin production that would mean the securing land now is the optimal strategy? Or am I facing a decade or so of high-cost/low-margin operations if grain commodities fall back to earth but energy stays high in which case land prices will start to fall? The steady state of 2008-2019 was pretty easy to manage - this is a different world.
Then (depending on your political views) there's the broader cost to society of tax-evasion that sometimes comes with cash payments (I'm not saying that cash is bad, but it's pretty clear that some businesses that are cash-only are avoiding tax and paying workers under-the-table, which has impacts both for government and the workers involved)
That surcharge is also why most credit card terminals default to debit card when presented Visa/MC debit card is used. Debit cards incur a lower fee from the network than the credit card fee. Of course the customer also has less recourse using debit vs credit when it comes to chargebacks, extended warranties, etc.
I previously lived in Japan and this was such a big difference compared to the US. In US stores it can take minutes to find someone if you have a question and when you do find someone they'll usually be dealing with something else. In Japan stores had so much staff that a store employee was always within a stone's throw away. The same thing at restaurants.
The proletariat can be taught to take their class problems out on the customers. I assume that the third party delivery companies' leadership even encourage their drivers to take out their class frustrations on customers that complain about problems.
https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...
I don't get it, how does them "burning through consumer goodwill" through their issues show that "sophisticated brand theory" (ie. "We're not like the other airlines") is bullshit? If anything it shows that it's working exactly as advertised. When they were "not like the other airlines" they were liked, and now they're hated.
There's a lot of talk about "look at the low employment numbers, automation hasn't made humans redundant after all, so stop being such a luddite". But what is usually overlooked is the downward pressure that it's put on wages (when adjusted for inflation), and the yawning income gap referred to above.
That phrase about recorded apologies is just dystopian.
They used to do call centers in the cheapest places but now have agents that are a) local to your time zone and b) are not governed solely by basic metrics but are actual careers with an actual progression ladder.
You’d not think these are intrinsic but it’s turned out to be fantastic in aggregate as a customer.
I have always had a great experience with their support since they updated their process circa 2018.
You would rather wait in line or wait to be checked on than do something right away?
At the airport (Houston, specifically), I prefer to use the self-service tablet as it’s more convenient.
At restaurants I will not order via toast (or similar), since it requires an account. If that is the only option, I will leave.
I sat at the gate behind 20 other people in line, waiting. I called the support number and tried to use the app while on hold.
The person on the phone managed to snipe a flight that put me home four hours later than my original plans, with a free, unsolicited upgrade to first class. The best the app showed me was a 48 hours delay. Nobody had showed up to help the line of people by the time I was off to find a comfortable seat.
I usually dislike talking to people. When it comes to stressful situations or customizations that aren't cheap (think cars or dining out,) a living, breathing professional is going to be much more useful than an inherently limited screen.
Waiting, on the other hand, is an opportunity to meditate, which I always appreciate, and usually improves my state.
I hadn't thought of it this way before, but I totally agree. We're told to judge the person rather than the system.
2) Is this even a new thing? Did John D. Rockefeller ever have to endure an angry tirade from someone pissed about the gas prices?
3) Have you seen Southwest's stock price? The workers are getting their pay no matter what. The shareholders have just lost $3 billion in value.
4) Are we just going to pretend that the airlines didn't nearly just collapse 2 years ago? SouthWest took on a peak of $11 billion in debt as of 2021 Q3, now down to $8 billion. Do you blame them for cutting customer support staff?
5) Southwest does have a variety of consumer friendly policies: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/reasons-southwest-...
I could go on
Southwest's meltdown was about computer systems that coordinate "offline" based on assumptions instead of online based on passing information back and forth on a regular basis.
Southwest was a very reliable airline, it didn't have some sort of day-to-day understaffing problem, they executed an unorthodox business strategy [0] in the last year or so that has degraded their performance, and bad weather exacerbated the problem.
0: https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/southwest-becomes-one-of-amer...
What got Southwest could get any airline: being stretched too thin, running schedules too tight, having everything just in time, all to cram as many fares into the sky as possible.
American also had huge delays and cancellations, United kind of always has huge delays and cancellations. There but for the grace goes any other airline in this situation.
The lesson from all this, it seems to me, is that if a meltdown can happen to a company like Southwest, which has ample resources and talent, then it could happen to anyone.
This is only really true prior to deregulation in 1978.
After that, Delta began hub-and-spoke out of Atlanta, and the majority of airlines followed them.
These days, as far as I can tell, Southwest is the only major carrier that doesn't follow this approach. It has its downsides. You don't have pilots sitting "on reserve" at bases ready to fly at a moments notice if there are gaps in the system. There isn't a need to shut down and esentially "reboot" the airline when there is a major disruption, which is what Southwest just had to do. Delta had the second highest cancellation rate due to this winter storm, and that was at 10%. Southwest had to cancel 70% of their schedule.
That doesn't strike me as the lesson at all, the lesson seems to be that if you have a part of your process that is brittle (staff tracking & scheduling) you need to be aware of that limitation and either address it or not execute a business strategy that makes it sure to break under duress. American & United had a lot of delays and cancellations but they did not have to essentially shut down their airlines so they could spend a few days figuring out where their crews actually were! Southwest had to do that! (And many of the SW crews had to book their own accommodation in the hopes that they would be reimbursed because everything was broken.)
The article does make it seem like the ptp model is the issue.. and it is the issue in the sense that ptp is certainly harder to support if you can't actually track where your staff is.. but having the worst staff tracking system in the industry and straining that part of your business by adding more routes that require more stringent staff tracking is kinda my point!
If you provide a replicable service or talent to a corporation, it is incentivized to use technology to make you generic. This makes you easily replaceable, lowers your economic value i.e. your wages, and reduces management complexity.
In both cases, the corporation is incentivized to use technology to reduce the number of people it needs.
It is like a vertically oriented barbell, but with the bar getting longer, the balls at the end getting smaller. The people at the top are fewer but wealthier. Those at the bottom are more in number, but also often getting fewer, and definitely getting poorer (relatively).
The bar is automation. The implicit goal is for the two balls to shrink to the point that there is only the bar, only automation.
--
This isn't due to politics, or morals, or even greed. It is just an extension of natural selection.
Social solutions need to take into account more than just capitalism - which after all, is only part of the ecosystem of life - while still keeping the benefits of capitalism.
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For instance, if untapped natural resources were considered a joint inheritance of all humans, then everyone would inherit at least a minimal base level income, providing a base line level of financial security and leverage. Resource extractors would bid to use resources, with the result of their bidding shared by all.
Charity is an alternative, but it doesn't present a clear structure for operating, and is notoriously difficult to rationalize consistently with capitalism. Charity is hard to scale and maintain without conflict, corruption and gaps in coverage where it is needed.
Whereas, equal shares of the inheritance of the resources, that the universe bequeathed to all of us, is a stronger, more orderly, non-coercive, structure for sharing wealth.
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Taxing real estate based on the land, not the structure, recognizes that land is a limited availability common resource and treats land ownership more like renting, with the proceeds shared by all.
Since structures are not taxed, development of land is not disincentived with greater taxes, making it cheaper to increase land's productivity (i.e. adding and improving structures for businesses, more homes, etc.). And since unused land is taxed as heavily as used land, it becomes unattractive as a financial hedge (no longer useful like gold, or perhaps bitcoin), lowering non-productive financial-instrument demand for land.
Thus making land both more productive AND affordable.
The road ahead is going to be rocky, but there are ways it can be made smoother.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/cases-decisions/decisions/administrativ...
https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-06-instacart-revises-pay-po...
As far as I know Instacart has stopped doing this, and many other apps were busted for this, but it's utterly, utterly shameful.
Unionized may end up deciding that tips work in their favor, so that's not necessarily a solution. What we really need is for the government to ban soliciting of tips or to ensure prices are fully transparent prior to sale. That's a more realistic solution anyway, and one with fewer potential societal costs to it.
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/statement-on-n...
I'm sure that's why I don't see tip jars at grocery store checkouts, because the workers there are so well paid. Moreover, if you work at a job that society thinks is socially acceptable to ask for tips, why would you leave money on the table just because you're paid $25/hr?
I do not care if people think I am not paid well, if they want to tip me, I am more than happy to accept it.
When I worked as a server, tips were far preferable to salary.
We’d get $10/hr plus tips, which could work out to $30/hr on average.
We had people who came from other server jobs paying $20/hr with no tips who felt they were getting screwed.
in which city? I would never describe making $62k a year in NYC as being paid well.
There is a reason why so many people work jobs that pay tips when apparently HN thinks a flat hourly rate is better.
In NYC I've heard it's not unusual to get $80-100k at a higher-end place under a tips model.
Which one.
Tipping is a stupid concept. Japan has the number three economy in the world and they'll refuse tips.
Watch https://youtube.com/watch?v=V4sbYy0WdGQ&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE and tell me that he's wrong.
I am going to need a better definition of overpaid and underpaid, and the Reservoir Dogs quip about women only being able to be economically independent due to tips is also going to need a source.
How do you find it a reasonable argument to compare upper-end office workers to service industry employees? Are you saying lawyers and engineers are paying their mortgages with tips?
> If a business is pushing for tips (those dumbass Toast POS consoles that now often start tipping at 20%), the workers are underpaid.
If the argument is “if workers are paying for their mortgage with tips, then they are underpaid”, then I would respond that analyzing each individual’s cost structure to determine how much you should pay them is, at the least, very inefficient.
This is done (in part) to incentive the business to ensure their workers are reporting their tipped income, it is not uncommon for people to try to evade taxation by not reporting tipped income
Exploring a bit into how it might fail: AFAIK Japanese people shun tips because it is seen as an unwelcome incentive to do better, and they take pride in doing their best wherever. Tipping, thus, is akin to saying "This should motivate you to do better next time" - basically an insult. This is said in the site you linked to as well, it quotes a testimonial from an employee that didn't quit an oppressive job she had because a customer complimented her work. Not because of a silent tip and a nod.
An app that intends to 'remove friction in tipping' and 'motivate employees with tips', goes against Japanese cultural values very hard. The workers are (allegedly) not motivated by tips and tipping doesn't have a friction problem unless you're the owner/manager trying to get in on it. Additionally, this is something the workers have no input on, it is a terminal on a table whose sole purpose is to add tips to the service. No employer would ever allow its workers to do this just because, let alone pay a company for this service. There has to be a split of some sorts embedded into the game, which leads me to think this will motivate only prospective employers looking to get a cut on the tip income.
According to the site, the terminal only asks if you want to tip and the customer says yes or no, with a tick note appearing in the terminal if the customer says yes. This could help cover tip stealing. How would you ever know your tips were stolen if you didn't even know you were tipped in the first place?
So not only are they importing the tip system from the United States, but also the adversarial relationship between hosts and owner/managers that encourages tip stealing, and a form of tip stealing that the workers can't stop because it's in an app controlled by the owner/manager, not a jar tallied at the end of the day by the same workers that filled it.
Maybe I'm reading too deep into it, I tend to do that sometimes.
What's your definition of "underpaid"? What does anyone deserve to get paid?
It's really really difficult to create some sort of moral framework around the jobs people do and the rewards they get for doing them (does a plumber deserve to get paid more than a dental hygienist?). Capitalism is efficient because it doesn't try to. It just rewards people for supplying the things others want.
"Underpaid"/"overpaid" would have to be relative to what markets pay. But if all servers receive tips, that's just what the market is doing.
More simply, you wouldn't argue that janitors are correctly paid, just because they don't receive tips. They just don't have the surface to collect them.
With that said, workers in the US tend to have significantly more bargaining power than those in countries with more diverse and relaxed labour laws.
There have been restaurants have tried non-tipping models, consumers and staff both hate it. First the highly productive staff often make less under that model (where poor performers make more), consumers hate it because the menu prices increase, and you end up with McD's level customer service where drinks are never refilled, and service overall degrades.
Although based on some recent news articles I found when I tried searching for a more definitive source, tip amounts have gone down in the past year or so.
hmmmm
>>but it might be that service in general is poorer now.
I wonder why that might be? You have allowed emotion to screw the system. the entire purpose off a tip is pay for the service. no serivce no tip. People work of incentives, if they know they will get 20% no matter what why would or should they give you good service?
you set the expectation, and now complain that people have given you exactly what you expected of them
One sensible metric is that you should be able to support yourself while living in the area you work (or an area nearby such that it isn't a significant financial hardship or timesink to commute to work). Service jobs largely fail on that metric, effectively using government money and family support structures to cover the gap.
I don't know how you got to that, other than by assuming that nice areas have to be expensive. The fact that SF is unable to achieve both is an indicator of broken local markets and politics, not an ironclad rule for every other locality.
Edit: Another framing is that "nice" and "fancy" are different things, as much as extremely unequal markets like SF distort the distinction.
This is generally the case. I can’t think of a single counter example.
Most of the US satisfies these constraints, especially if you own and don't mind driving a car.
San Francisco can be a playground for the rich until they get sick of paying for $30 lattes or whatever and flee to low cost locales like Manhattan that have affordable housing and transit.
It won’t be “fixed” until we’re all backed into an economic corner where it becomes politically acceptable for the property owners to lose bazillions of dollars.
This is problem with basing wages on an individual needs, in reality the wage you are paid should have, and does have nothing to do with the amount of money you "need" to support yourself.
it is just a arbitrary wage picked by legislatures exactly like a "minimum wage" law only the "living wage" seems to apply to older people, where "minimum wage" laws apply to everyone. For example a 20yo in the UK can make "minimum wage" but a 24yo will need to make "living wage" both of which are just numbers pulled out of thin air, not connected to "the amount of money you need to support yourself. "
The living wage is not in the UK. Dispute the method all you want of course, but there is a method:
Yes, it gets complicated, but “$7.25/hr isn’t enough” is not complicated.
Not everything needs a government mandate. Every drive thru, and service job I see is has $13, $15, $16 per hour wages, and this is in the midwest where the median income is hovering around 50-55K
That's factually untrue and kind of an absurd statement. Of course people live in Manhattan working as servers.
The idea that a job shouldn't exist if it is only something that would interest a high-school student or uneducated young adult who is willing to live with lots of roommates creates fewer opportunities at the low end--not more.
I think as well something that would be concerning regarding the quality of service of the places that you're talking about that the quality of service depends upon how much money is being given, and less things that oftentimes help people perform on the job better (non-toxic environment, healthy egoless leadership, good colleagues, good company ethos and ethics, etc).
Obviously pay is important, it's a job after all, but people can't magic the willpower to perform well for money out of nowhere. I think that's up to the company to protect and foster that kind of a productive workplace where people can achieve their potential.
You mean like most restaurants in europe? Yes the service there is on average worse than in American restaurants because of tips, but in my opinion not by enough of a margin to cost me 20% every time. The times that you would tip at a eu restaurant, its something reasonable well below the ridiculous 20% average that American businesses have swindled into existence (because a tip is supposed to be extra, not the employee's actual means to paying rent)
The US has a less hard sell model and free refills. That changes alot of the dynamics
Also if you are drinking alcohol (and only Alcohol) with EVERY meal, well you may have a problem
They better just raise the menu price, any place that has a 20% service charge added automatically (outside the standard large party ) will never get my patronage again
>> once you add sales tax
that is nothing like Sales Tax. Sales tax is a fee the government is charging ME that the business is mandated by the government to collect on my behalf, I owe the tax not the business. People often do not understand that context. Just like when your employer taxes out of your paycheck, you owe the income tax but the employer is mandated to collect it because the government do not trust you with your own money.
Similar to the argument against unions.
I have one such restaurant near me and I neither hate it nor experience bad service. It's been like this a few years and they're doing fine.
I’ve travelled all over the world and I don’t find the service in America to be that much better honestly.
I have no problems looking them in the eye and pressing 0% -- No Tip.
Citation needed. My experiences at no-tipping restaurants have been the absolute opposite of your claims: great food, great service, and no fucking around with tipping afterwards.
If I'm at a restaurant, I really don't want to have much interaction with most of the staff; I'm there to talk to my dining party and to eat and drink. _Really_ good wait staff know this and are attentive (e.g. to your drinks, or can notice when you need them), personable when they're there, but otherwise you don't notice them. I think tipping culture discourages this, as being invisible isn't an obvious way to get a tip.
I just wanted to share the fact that there are places where tips are shared by the whole staff, and that system works well (I can't say if it works worse or better than the one you're describing as I don't have much experience with it). It also has the advantage that non-public-facing staff (e.g., cooks) get their share of tips too.
For some services like Uber Eats/DoorDash I've heard that orders will just sit on a shelf because the tip isn't high enough to entice someone to "claim" that order. Tipping is mandatory if you want to get your food in any reasonable timeframe.
Tipping has spread further and further into our economy and into areas it never should have existed (I'd argue it shouldn't exist at all but it's moved well past "traditional" and reasonable places). Services have the audacity to charge you a membership fee and then essentially require tips on top of that (Looking at you Kroger Boost, I've got a blog article worth of issues with that service).
Honestly this is great, for two reasons:
1. You're letting the market figure out the right price for delivery service at any given moment, which reduces deadweight loss. For instance, if you're price sensitive you can order during off-peak times to get a discount. On the other hand, if it's peak hours and you need food urgently (impatient kids?), you can be assured that your order arrives ASAP rather than 1 hour later.
2. It strengthens the case for DSPs treating their delivery workers as contractors, because the price isn't set by the DSP.
edit:
To be clear, I'm for having prices for delivery services be set by the market (ie. people who want food delivered can put in bids and delivery drivers can put in asks). I'm not for the current state of affairs where your order is "accepted" but you have to put in some indeterminate amount of tips to get it actually serviced.
Also as a consumer I have absolutely zero information on how busy drivers are, if my tip needs to be > $X to get picked up faster, if more drivers will login if I tip $X or greater, nor do I have a way to increase my tip if drivers aren’t “biting”.
IF I had that information/ability I’d concede to part of your point but I don’t and even if I did I hate that idea with a fiery passion. If that’s the world we are going to live in then why am I paying a membership fee AND service fees?
I’d say you don’t get to eat your cake and have it too but that’s absolutely what these companies are doing.
Why do you expect that the app won't have such information displayed? The UX isn't hard. It seems pretty trivial to show a bid/ask chart of delivery prices, along with stats like how many drivers are online and how many orders are coming in. You could even use those pieces of information to come up with an estimate for how much you have to bid to get a driver within n minutes.
edit:
I re-read my original comment and realized that it was worded in such a way that implied that I supported the state of affairs that the gp described. To be clear, I'm only advocating for letting the price be determined dynamically.
>If that’s the world we are going to live in then why am I paying a membership fee AND service fees?
I don't see how this is relevant to my proposal. It's already the case today that you can get charged a membership fee (eg. uber one) and get charged delivery/service fees.
I've used them. They don't. You seem to be conflating a description of how things are today with how things could be run instead.
As an idea… it might be neat to try at least. But I think you’d have to build the whole service around delivery bidding, there must be abuses in this sort of market, right? As a customer, make 10 accounts and “take” every bid higher than yours, that sort of thing.
I realized that after reading some of the replies. I made various edits accordingly.
>As an idea… it might be neat to try at least. But I think you’d have to build the whole service around delivery bidding, there must be abuses in this sort of market, right? As a customer, make 10 accounts and “take” every bid higher than yours, that sort of thing.
This is probably a non-issue. My impression is that it takes a non-trivial amount of work to get a driver account on such platforms. At the very least you need to give some sort of driver license scan and/or background/SSN check. That alone makes it fairly hard to set up fake accounts to take out competing bids, just so you can save $5 or whatever on your delivery.
And what I'm saying is that there's already uncertainty. The current interface of DSPs showing that it'll arrive within 30 minutes or whatever, is a leaky abstraction of how the underlying system (ie. restaurants and delivery drivers) work. Just as how DSPs likely have some sort of system to estimate delivery times based on current supply and demand, they can build a system that also factors in price, and give consumers various price options and their associated estimates.
No, you aren’t, because there is no clear signal to the buyer about acceptable price (except, the outright fraudulent, if one accepts that the tip is actually part of the delivery charge, membership + delivery free charged by the intermediary).
> It strengthens the case for DSPs treating their delivery workers as contractors, because the price isn't set by the DSP.
Unless you are a shareholder of the DSP, this isn’t a benefit.
See my edits.
>Unless you are a shareholder of the DSP, this isn’t a benefit.
The existence of gig jobs is a benefit for people who can't work regular hours, and therefore can't get jobs as "employees" (delivery or otherwise).
Employees with irregular hours are a thing, and were even moreso before the trend of forcing them into more precarious designated-as-contractor-roles (often contrary to labor law) became popular with the “gig economy”.
Note that I never made any claims about whether it's actually better for every employee, or even the average employee. I was only responding to your claim that "Unless you are a shareholder of the DSP, this isn’t a benefit". Moreover, I'm skeptical your claim that people are being "forced" from being employees to being contractors. At least when it comes to restaurants, the DSPs were basically servicing restaurants that didn't do deliveries before. Therefore it's highly unlikely that anyone who was previously a delivery employee was forced to switch to being contractors, because those jobs didn't even exist before.
On the other hand, I was recently doing searches for "food near me" and the UberEats / DoorDash delivery fees were under $1.
I'm not really pleased that useful search results about what is where have been replaced by useless ads for UberEats, but there's no argument to be made that you're getting charged twice when you're asked to tip. As far as the pricing goes, delivery appears to be priced at "pay what you want".
I'm reporting the itemized delivery fee advertised by the services. I did no investigation at all, because I wasn't looking for delivery.
In my experience, anything less than a 50% off coupon for DD or UE is not worth it. Their markup and delivery fees really add up.
They have a low fixed "delivery fee" that they advertise heavily and then add a 15% "service fee" for the customer and also charge the restaurant a percentage.
It allows places to keep base prices as cheap as possible, which means lots of people can afford to eat out, but people who can afford to pay more can do so. It’s sort of like raising the minimum wage but but having the costs only impact people with higher incomes.
Yes, plenty of rich people are stingy and terrible tippers, so it’s not a perfect analogy. But I try to tip a lot everywhere I go and that’s how I think about it.
Corporations are in competition with other corporations, which is why there is not dynamic pricing. They are not offering anything worth more than they are offering. Your perspective fails on those merits when the solution is to pay employees correctly and see which corporations were never economical after all.
This is a fantasy. https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...
>Those that drive corruption and cheating the max are the winners in this world
This is the status quo. All the rules are written to keep some very undesirable people in positions of power over you.
Absolutely. Prices should be raised to cover reasonable salaries (making up the gap covered by tips nowadays), and then if you were really happy with the service and want to tip more, you can.
They literally aren't allowed to hang up on you!
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/southwest...
> WASHINGTON, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) customer service employees overwhelmingly ratified a new five-year collective bargaining agreement that includes an immediate 13.1% wage increase, the IAM union said on Thursday.
> The agreement covers 8,300 customer representatives and service agents and includes a 25.1% general wage increase over four years, which IAM said will put its members at the top of the airline industry’s pay scale for customer service employees.
> The labor deal also includes other benefits such as higher bonuses and improved mandatory overtime protections for all employees.
Airlines make choices about how to run their business.
Consumers make choices about which business to give their money to.
If businesses screw up, then consumers leave.
It’s really that simple.
What exactly is bizarre about it? The world is a class struggle.
The world is way more complex than just "class".
> The world is way more complex than just "class".
You don't have to be a Marxist to recognize that class is one of the most important characteristics of our society. A black woman living in poverty has far more in common with a white man living in poverty than an upper-class Ivy-league educated black man. People are systemically exploited and robbed of the value they create and deserve. Some of the hardest working people, who provide essential services, struggle to stay afloat.
I am by no means a Marxist or Communist, I just grew up under the poverty line and recognize how fortunate I have been in my life compared to many other people. I'd encourage you to reflect on your own fortune and have more empathy for those who are less fortunate.
I'd encourage you to broaden your world view to more than just economic status.
> I'd encourage you to broaden your world view to more than just economic status.
It's easy not to think about the importance of your economic status when you're well-off. The vast majority of people don't have that luxury.
Like I said, broaden your viewpoint.