Just wanted to pass the word about what happened to my sister last month.

My sister was visiting me at the beginning of March. She flew with her just turned 5 year old child.

Yes, my sister is also overweight, but her child is a little string-bean.

As my sister is waiting in the "boarding with children" line when a Southwest Airlines employee comes up and asks her if she is comfortable flying. My sister says, yeeeeessss..... not sure where he was going with his comments. Then he started to ask if she was comfortable in the seats, yeeeeessssss......then it dawns on her. He is specifically asking her this because she is fat and he confirmed it by then asking her if when she is sitting in the seat can she put the arm rests down because the law states she must fly with the arm rests down. She was livid, but what could she do? Yell at the guy in front of her child ? All she could say was that she was flying with her small child and there would not be a problem. She was near tears.

Mind you, the Southwest Airlines employee did this in front of EVERYONE. If Southwest Airlines has a problem with overweight people buying tickets from them, then they should say so at the time of purchase ! My sister found it very humiliating.

Wheres your proof?

There have been numerous articles about this in many business magazines. If you look at the top salaries for most companies it's many times more than the next level down. Plus there are many instances where companies have to close factories, lay off people, etc. to cut costs but that same year the Board votes to give all the top level execs bonuses. It's insane, frankly. If they can't run the business well enough to make a profit, why are they getting a *reward*?

Its hard to become customer focus when costs get out of control and it is no longer feasible to give the came amount of service then before without raising prices.

Yet that's when it's the most important to do so.

Free country, they can have that policy.

And they can go out of business. Which they are well on their way to doing...

Your calling them overpaid, bad managers, and have bad accountants without one number to support you. Who's slinging the BS?

How do you know I haven't got any numbers to support me? Again, there have been tons written the airline industry as well.

Done this too. Although, not sure what other services airplanes can sell? I know one airline put in a plane filled with bunny girls for trips to Vegas, that was interesting.

The first thing they can do is stop thinking of themselves as being in the "airline business". They need to think about their business differently, more broadly. The successful companies do that. They have broad vision. Can you imagine if Google thought of themselves as only a search engine company or Apple thought of themselves as only a computer company?

Here's something that will boggle the minds of all people who think you have to charge what something costs or not survive: the company I work for right now makes software. We recently started giving some of it away. We found we make MORE money if we start people out with a freebie. Some people come for the freebie but decide to buy the version that costs money. Many of these never would have even looked into our products if they hadn't heard about the free version. Some people take the freebie, but then they sign up for all these services to go with it ... services that cost money, services they wouldn't have signed up for if they hadn't gotten the base product for free.

So it's not as simple as "it costs 20000 to fly this flight with 200 seats so I have to sell 200 tickets at $100 each."

Thanks for the 9th grade business lecture.

Thanks for not being condensing. :confused:

With all this I leave you with this one last thing. If airlines had it so good, a great profit margin, and execs were making hand over fists (compared to other companies).

Nobody said airlines have it good or that their execs make more than other execs. They are in trouble. But their answers are short-sighted. They are focusing on costs. They aren't using their imagination. They aren't showing me vision. And they aren't cutting the big costs -- executive salaries and bonuses.

Coke and Pepsi used to spend millions of dollars a year fighting over a few percentage points of market share in the soft drink market. While they weren't looking, bottled-water and health drinks and energy drinks stole their market share out from under them.

Instead of saying "we're a soft drink company and our expenses aren't being covered by our sales so we need to raise the price of soft drinks", they got creative.

Pepsi bought Pizza Hut and Taco Bell -- which now exclusively sell Pepsi products. These companies got into the snack market too. So if you don't pick their drinks to go with your chips, maybe you'll at least pick their chips. They also expanded into the energy drink and health drink and bottled-water fields so they now have competitors in those niches. But then they went one-up ... instead of Coke just making a competitor to Vitamin Water, they added vitamins to Diet Coke! I think that's freaking brilliant. Keep all those Diet Coke drinkers in the fold instead of switching to one of the vitamin-added waters, which might not be *your* vitamin-added water.

Pepsi and Coke could have been down for the count when the market changed, but instead they rethought their businesses. That's why they've been around forever and probably always will be. The airlines could take a few lessons from them.

yes, i do....

Thats exciting. I work at a car dealership. You handle the skies...I got the land covered.

:confused:

I posted about this new ruling in Canada earlier. There is no question in my mind that the American Airlines treat the overweight person in a negative way. They know very well they are discriminating. Someday some organization will take them to court. As for my thoughts, If I have to pay for two seats the airline could put in a row of larger seats with slightly higher fares. If I had a comfortable seat, I would pay the extra. I think it unlikely the seats would go empty. quote]

I like that Idea. And then you would know how much you were going to have to pay, instead of trying to slip by without people noticing your big bottom trailing you (I say you as in me)

You mean you want to make a company respect all?

If I put time, money, and effort into starting a company I sure the hell will want to run it the way I want to (unless I infringe on someone constitutional rights).

This is true...my business, my rules. Then again, you have to treat your customers or clients with respect to get repeat business and That is how you make a profit. Unless your say the electric company or I guess the IRS.

If all the airlines treated everyone like crap, then people would drive a whole lot more. If cars were way to expensive to afford (which sometimes they seem like they are getting that way) then I guess I would learn to ride a bike again. I would lose a LOT of weight that way since I live in Louisiana and everything is so spread out. After a month I could probablee fit into one of those airplane seats.