Posted on 10/31/2012 6:47:25 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
No, they do not, one is as far from the other than the willing sacrifice of God is from being hypothetically able to force God to sacrifice.
First, if someone had already purchased the ticket, they wouldn't have had to pay $4,000 for a seat.
Second, the $400 bump fee is mandated in law. Customarily, airlines also refund the full cost of your ticket when that happens - at least on Southwest.
Third, what reservations system allows 47 overbookings?
I think that he made it up as a class lesson in mythology.
He also completely misses the point of the AFI article - even Reich and his agent work to guarantee their maximum profit. The same behavior by capitalist politicians is fundamentally unfair.
Leaving New York City yesterday bound for California on one of the last flights out of JFK before the airport closed, a flight attendant told me I was lucky to already have my ticket. In light of the pending hurricane, the airlines had just hours before jacked up ticket prices on the flight to $4,000 (I had paid a few hundred dollars when I bought it last week).
As a result of the last-minute rush for tickets, the flight was oversold by 47 passengers. So the flight attendants offered money to any passengers who volunteered to switch their tickets to the next flight out of NYC, whenever that might be. The first offer of $200 wasnt enough to elicit 47 volunteers, nor were the subsequent ones of $300 and $350. An offer of $400 finally did the trick.
Assuming that the 47 extra passengers had each paid $4,000 to get onto the plane at the last minute, and the 47 who gave up their seats for them received $400 in return, the trade would have been rational in narrow market terms. After all, the seats were worth $4,000 to those who bought them at the last minute, and switching to the next flight (whenever that might be) was worth $400 to those who agreed to do so.
But the transaction was also deeply exploitative. The airline netted a huge profit because of the impending storm.
I couldnt help think this was a miniature version of the America well have if Mitt Romney is elected president. Rational and efficient in terms of supply and demand, guaranteed to maximize profits, but fundamentally unfair.
I didn’t say it is a tax; I said it’s like a tax. I employed a simile to demonstrate how similar is the airline missing out on money due to the public’s economic ignorance to the government coercing money out of them through the taxing power.
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