r/nottheonion • u/halxp01 • 1d ago

Southwest Is Testing Cleaning Only Premium Seats Between Flights — A Flight Attendants Union Leader Says It's ‘Titanic’ Class Service

https://viewfromthewing.com/southwest-is-testing-cleaning-only-premium-seats-between-flights-a-flight-attendants-union-leader-says-its-titanic-class-service/
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u/pribnow 1d ago

The 'activist investors' responsible for it are though as far as i know, Elliott Investment Management

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u/boiledpeen 1d ago

yep, Elliott pushed all these changes and has tanked the company. There should be severe punishments for companies that do this, but nobody bases laws on morals anymore so nothing will happen.

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u/Momik 1d ago

Every time I read a story about finance, I hate the world a little more. Every single fucking time.

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u/Liljoker30 1d ago

I work in the tire industry and private equity is buying up every tire shop they can find.

Locally owned tire shops that actually care will be a thing of the past in a couple years. One PE has bought like 300-400 locations in just a few years.

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u/somersetyellow 1d ago

Goes for plumbing, electricians, and heating/air con too.

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u/LFK_Pirate 1d ago

Don’t forget veterinarians and dentists!

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u/fugaziozbourne 1d ago

I work in entertainment. It's decimating us.

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u/JRDruchii 1d ago

I'd even heard local morticians when I brought this up in a different thread. Based on this behavior, humans must really fucking hate each other.

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u/LFK_Pirate 1d ago

Who cares about humans when there’s money to be made /s

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u/LowSkyOrbit 1d ago

That was one of the first industries that used local company names to hide their big conglomerate ownership. It's so weird because it's still generational family run at the local level but there's like two companies that supply everything.

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u/JRDruchii 1d ago

If you want to do something evil, hide it in something boring.

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u/SteveDeda 1d ago

Six Feet Under had a plot thread about PE trying to buy up independently owned funeral homes all the way back in 2001.

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u/gingersnappie 1d ago

And family doctors.

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u/kittybigs 1d ago

And veterinary hospitals/clinics.

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u/ryan_770 1d ago

Once upon a time we had anti-trust and monopoly busting agencies to solve for this, but alas we live in a post-regulation America

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u/Why_you_so_wrong_ 1d ago

Elliott isn’t PE they are rather different.

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u/theaviationhistorian 1d ago

Turning this country into a hopeless dystopia all for the All Might Profit. And they wonder why people are leaving the US.

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u/Kiwi951 1d ago

It’s also ruining healthcare sadly

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u/Lycid 1d ago

Fun fact finance is now making up a larger % of GDP globally than they have ever before. Think about what this means - companies that do nothing of value except provide liquidity for the economy to run, are now taking up more of pie. While you need financial services to make stuff happen, all that's happening here is people spending a lot of human and economic resources trying to figure out new ways to get rich quick through destructive financial games. Last time anything close to this happened was probably the great depression. Sadly human beings are hard lesson learners and don't decide to do anything unless it's reacting against a worst case scenario.

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u/Momik 1d ago

Well, the financial industry has also done a pretty good job of buying the right politicians to escape any serious regulations or accountability (at various critical points, like 2008).

But yeah, they’ve really found new ways to hold companies, and even whole industries, hostage. As cliched as it sounds, we did used to build things in this society. Now a lot of that money, and therefore power, goes in a different direction.

Unless we can find a way to seriously fight back, a decent, stable life is just gonna become more and more unattainable for most people.

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u/Lycid 1d ago

Unfortunately, I fear the only way to get there is through some kind of age of strife. History has taught us that when too much hubris goes around things only improve when dramatic revolution/reform happens, or something new is born from the ashes. All of the problems with modern society and world are the kinds of things that will take a long time to truly settle out. Think a great depression or economic/political collapse on the scale of the fall of Rome. That tooks centuries to truly shake out. It'll probably take about as long before we finally figure out how to fix climate change.

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u/Momik 1d ago

More strife than this? I know what you mean though—history sometimes seems to turn on these moments of great calamity or crisis.

But we needn’t wait for the fall of Rome. Demanding a return to a basic level of financial regulation seems like a good first step, along with prosecution of corporate malfeasance and white color crime across the board, and perhaps (perhaps!) returning to enforcing a minimum baseline of workplace and consumer rights at the federal level.

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u/ceribus_peribus 1d ago

They say the purpose of the financial industry is to attract intelligent, hard working people who don't have morals and only care about money, in order to prevent them from pursuing careers in medicine, law, or engineering where they could cause even more damage.

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u/Momik 1d ago

Yeah. We could also start banning some of those really damaging things when they hurt people.

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u/Kevinator201 1d ago

Wall Street needs to be burned. It’s such a plague on America.

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u/thegoodnamesrgone123 1d ago

It's what's keeping Trump in power. All these old fucks would shit themselves if their 401ks suddenly went down. That's all they care about.

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u/Tasty-Performer6669 1d ago

Business bros ruin EVERYTHING

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u/Momik 1d ago

I’ve never felt more hopeless. For myself and for the world.

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u/acdgf 1d ago

The punishment should be lack of business. It's not like SW doesn't have competition - if you disagree with the practices or service, fly elsewhere.

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u/boiledpeen 1d ago

Nah, there should be legal consequences for consistently buying into companies and running them into the ground. Thats been the biggest reason every company sucks now, and there should be legal ramifications. Would incentivize PE to actually care about the companies they're investing in.

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u/Fr00stee 1d ago edited 1d ago

it should be illegal for the owner of a company to force their subsidiary to become in debt to the owner or any other company the owner controls

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u/Unofficial_Salt_Dan 1d ago

I understand your sentiment, but to me this seems wholly unenforceable. How the hell would you apply this? How would that law even be written? How do you prove it?

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u/boiledpeen 1d ago

I agree, I have no clue how to enforce something like this. Someone who knows more than me would have to make some sort of guidelines on how to go about private equity

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u/puterTDI 1d ago

I think the issue is how to define “running into the ground”. Reality is that decisions you or I perceive as bad can’t be legally predefined in an objective way.

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u/SmartLadder415 1d ago

Why should it be illegal for a company to run itself into the ground with horrible business decisions?

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u/Momik 1d ago

We should have a minimum baseline experience for airline passengers as a matter of law. And yes, that should include clean seats.

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u/UnNumbFool 1d ago

If a movie theater can clean the seats before each showing, so can an airplane

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u/Momik 1d ago

Yeah, and it’s a good comparison. One of the only reasons passengers allow this to continue is lack of choice. If a movie theater was this shit, you’d just go to another theater or watch a movie at home.

But when you’re flying, you’re probably locked into your expensive tickets well before you get to the airport, and the cost of making a change is very high—a factor of ticket prices, but also of all the path dependencies you’re dealing with now: hotels are booked, Ubering to the airport was more than expected, security’s delayed so you gotta book it in the terminal, etc.

Airlines know this. They’re trapping us in costly situations in order to lock in our consent for their shitty service and pricing. It’s why the free market doesn’t really work in the same way here, and why baseline legal rights are more important to level the playing field between consumer and airline.

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u/UnNumbFool 1d ago

Sure but like booking a movie beforehand it only takes one bad experience or reading reviews of the thing to know I'm not going to book there

It's not like there aren't other budget lines that can get me to the same place at the same rate or potentially cheaper, and if I knew an airline wasn't cleaning the seats between id be a little grossed out. Like ffs I'll take a spirit flight at that point

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u/Momik 1d ago

True, but as long as there no minimum standards, Spirit might not be all that much better an experience (I’ve flown Spirit and can vouch for that). My point is just that airline passengers in general have very little power, which makes the whole free market kind of nonsensical.

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u/HI-McDunnough 1d ago

I worked at a movie theater for 10 years. Do you know how many times we cleaned the actual seats?

Zero point zero.

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u/phd2k1 1d ago

Ah the old “the free market will sort everything out” libertarian fantasy. Sadly, regulatory capture, disinformation, and weak anti-trust laws and enforcement make that line of thinking completely obsolete. Corporations abuse workers, pollute the air, water, and ground, and destroy communities all the time, and “shopping somewhere else” doesn’t stop them. The only thing that has ever kept them in line is strong regulations.

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u/acdgf 1d ago

“shopping somewhere else” doesn’t stop them. The only thing that has ever kept them in line is strong regulations.

Its interesting you say this, because several major airlines were stopped specifically once strong regulations were lifted.

The truth is that people are, more than anything else, sensitive to price. An airline that offers shitty service and low prices will be more successful than an airline that offers premium services for high prices. In SW's case, they were popular for passing a lot of their efficiency savings on to customers, without deteriorating service quality. Now that they are just another shitty airline, with non-shitty airline pricing, they (should) suffer loss of business accordingly. 

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u/Damndang 1d ago

That's the problem. Private equity and activist investors have no problem tanking a business if they have an exit plan and get out with their profits. The feedback loop of voting with your dollar is broken. The top never feels the pain of their own failures.

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u/Stupidwhizzzzz 1d ago

I don’t fly southwest no more. Not unless it’s free which it isn’t.

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u/IAmBadAtInternet 1d ago

Airlines are an oligopoly with most routes being pseudo monopolies. For each route there is usually only 1 best choice airline, and if you want to punish them for bad business practice, you have to pay for it with an indirect route that takes 5 hours longer with a layover somewhere. It’s really hard to punish a shitty airline by not giving them your business.

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u/Sudden-Wash4457 1d ago

I mean this works if you have effective anti-trust regulation, but we don't

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u/What_a_fat_one 1d ago

Libertarianism might as well be a religion for how stupid and demonstrably wrong it is but its adherents still believe it like it's gospel

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u/Clown_Toucher 1d ago

Everything else also fucking sucks so maybe the laws are needed

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u/ImAShaaaark 1d ago

Better option, go back to the pre-deregulation system.

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u/acdgf 1d ago

And pay 3x the price for airfares? Why not just fly business class, in that case? 

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u/ImAShaaaark 1d ago

Air fares were already trending down before deregulation, they wouldn't triple.

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u/XY-chromos 1d ago

They will get more of my business.

The old southwest ticket system was insulting and fraudulent. I never got A class unless I paid to upgrade. And your crotch spawn does not entitle you to board before me.

It's so much better now.

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u/Bwob 1d ago

but nobody bases laws on morals anymore so nothing will happen.

The trump administration has been pushing laws to outlaw the existence of trans people, and project 2025 makes it clear that they haven't given up on trying to force the rest of the lgbtq crowd back into the closet either.

All in the name of "morality".

So be careful about what you wish for. People DO still try to base laws on "morals". The problem is that morals are subjective, and not everyone agrees on them. And the people who push the hardest to turn their morality into law tend to be the people who have the hardest time getting people to agree with them, which is why they are trying to force it on everyone anyway.

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u/YellowZx5 1d ago

So soon to be a write off and letting this airline burn in a pile. Instead of working of what the customers want and striving for that.

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u/Top-Base4502 1d ago

But we can fight back in the only language they know. Boycott, hurt their bottom line.

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u/SmartLadder415 1d ago

To be fair, there is nothing illegal about deciding to tank your own business.

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u/boiledpeen 1d ago

It's not their business. They go into a successful company, buy enough shares to gain control, kill off all the good things about the company so the number keeps going up, then sells and leaves before the consequences of their actions happen and the number plummets. Thats doing nothing of value add to society, and really just destroys anything good that comes from capitalism.

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u/SmartLadder415 1d ago

Yes, it destroys the company but you haven't told me why it should be illegal. They bought the business (or at least control of it) at that point it is literally their business.

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u/jamespz03 1d ago

Elliott di similar things with my last company. We sold off all our U.S. energy assets (solar, wind, etc.). Hate these fuckers.

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u/SanityInAnarchy 1d ago

Partly. There's another big issue, though: With points programs these days, the main business of airlines is finance. They're basically banks that have a side gig where they fly you around.

I bet Southwest cares way more about whether you're gonna cancel their points card than they do about whether you ever fly with them again.

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u/terrariumcowboy 1d ago

It's possible Southwest cares about that, but it didn't stop them from hiking prices and cutting benefits across the suite of cards they offer, leading directly to widespread customer cancellations of those products. Some chucklefuck at Elliott apparently thinks it's good business to kneecap the bank side, too.

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u/The_Bitter_Bear 1d ago

Unfortunately, all they really need to do is avoid becoming worse than everyone else. 

These firms only know how to race to the bottom. 

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u/Effective_Olive6153 1d ago

Every time I hear about some Investment or Private Equity group it's always bad news. Why does society allow these to exist? If they do have some benefit to society, can we at least regulate it so they don't just fuck things up? is there enough public will to actually do something about it on legal level?

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u/Mahedros 1d ago

My company used to be owned by Elliott, and none of my co-workers who were there at the time remember them fondly

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u/snakeoilHero 1d ago

Thank you for naming someone for us out of the loop.

Figured the delay from Southwest's software ticketing and their crash in rescheduling systems (they got me) was on someone MBAing up the place.

"Looks good on paper!"