Found this piece from the website Blackprof.com.
I remember back in March coming back from D.C. when US Airways had this massive computer glitch where thousands of people were stranded on the east coast I was stuck at Reagan National and instead of waiting in line for a flight that was never going to happen anyway I spent an extra night in a D.C.
That day, I asked myself the same thing, why do people continue to tolerate the shitty travel inconveniences caused by the airlines.
American’s should just say “screw this” we are not going to fly until the Airline industry gets its shit together. However spending money that folks clearly don’t have is far more important. So why not spend it on a hardly deserved vacation traveling in overcrowded germ vessels, with crying babies and deodorant deficient individuals.

If the bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing credit crunch were taking a toll on consumer spending, it certainly was not evident on Continental flight 449 from San Francisco to Newark, New Jersey. The flight was packed uncomfortably, as most are these days, and most of the commiseraters were leisure travelers. I was returning from a speaking commitment which, although inconvenient, I felt duty-bound to fulfill.

As passengers slogged onto the plane, struggled to fit oversized luggage into bins out of fear of having to check them, and forlornly maneuvered themselves into seats their waists long ago outgrew, I wondered to myself, “Why do Americans tolerate this?” Why, in particular, do we subject ourselves to the inhumanity of air travel to take a vacation that most of us cannot afford?

Americans consume like it’s our birthright, but we save like it’s the Great Depression. Not since 1933 have Americans had the negative rate of savings they experienced in 2006. Yet for all our fetish with consumption, there is broad discontent with much of the service we throw money away for.

Speak to someone about the quality of their cell phone service and hear the expletives fly: a Consumer Reports survey reveals that cellular carriers received an average score of 66 out of 100 for their service. Cable T.V.? Be prepared to take time off from the very employment that enables you to pay the cable bill in order to wait for a service call. Computer problems? Consumer Reports indicates that free manufacturer support is “abysmal,” resolving only 53% of the problems phoned in. And then there are the airlines. With an overall satisfaction rating of 72 out of 100, they beat computer tech support and cellular carriers, but spearheading a den of mediocrity hardly gives bragging rights. It’s all enough to make you wish that the corporate cons who are bilking us out of money that we should be saving spill enough red ink to dye each of their stockholder’s hair.

Who’s to blame for this incompetent capitalism? Consumers. Spending money that we don’t have on largely discretionary services with which we’re dissatisfied borders on obsessive-compulsive behavior. Economic theory tell us that competition spurs an incentive to innovate and improve services. When all competitors regress to a very low mean, however, services become uniformly bad and economic theory receives a deserved black eye. But one economic theory remains credible: if we don’t buy, business will respond or go under.

In 1955, blacks in Montgomery, Alabama organized a successful boycott of the Montgomery City Lines bus company, which practiced a de-humanizing form of segregation by requiring black passengers to yield their seats to whites and heaping gratuitous rudeness and verbal abuse on black customers. Martin Luther King, Jr. had hoped for a modest participation of 60% of the city’s black population, but instead virtually all of the city’s 55, 000 black residents stayed off the buses for a sustained period. These would-be passengers forewent a service that was essential to their livelihoods. Black citizens organized alternatives to the bus, like walking and car pools. Bus company revenues plummeted, and the city’s downtown businesses hemorrhaged profits as well.

Americans could learn a great deal from the Montgomery bus boycott. The recent National Blackout Day sought to recapture the essence of the bus boycott by urging citizens to suspend spending for a few days to show unity around causes such as Jena 6. Here’s a consumer variation of the blackout idea, one that might induce white Americans to act with blacks out of interest convergence: Americans should refuse to fly during the Thanksgiving Holidays of 2008.

Imagine the impact on the airlines’ revenues if a substantial fraction of the flying public refused to fly during the busiest season for the airlines. Yes, this would mean cooking at home or celebrating locally, but in the longer run, it could send a message to big business that our debt-soaked dollars deserve better service.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Blog Watch, Society.
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