Who cares about delaying an entire plane of busy people when you can save $20? [/bitter]
So most people will do this ticket hack even if it saves them just $5, or even just out of spite ("You made me jump through hoops? OK, now you sit and wait for me, haha!" kind of reaction). I am not justifying it or saying they are right, just illustrating the possible thought process.
Now from a market point of view, airlines are trying to solve this insanely complicated problem on how to maximize their profits from all these seats on their flights. It is almost like trying to do central planning on an economy of a small country -- this seat on this flight should cost X because we think demand for it is Y, unless demand changes and then we can increase the price, and then there are different legs, through different hubs, other partner airlines that try to do the same, it is just so complicated. So they end up creating these inefficiencies with inadvertent arbitrage possibilities. And people are taking advantage. Apparently they know about it and they are trying to put all kind of threatening legal mumbo-jumbo in their fine print. But they can't enforce it.
I think as more people start finding out and doing this they could: 1) ban customers in the future, 2) make them pay a fee next time they purchase, 3) lobby the govt. to declare this a grave security concern and make TSA chase these people down 4) try to adjust their pricing and fair structure to do away with this inefficiency.
Come to think of it, this question is about as close to an objective measure of an individual's level of morality as we can get. Screw all theories of moral relativism; I can tell whether you're a good person or not by knowing how much money it would take to tempt you to leave an entire planeload of people sitting on the tarmac for an extra ten minutes.
Lets consider a few hypothetical scenarios:
1. You can get 50 dollars but it may potentially result in 60 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?
2. You can get 1000 dollars but it may potentially result in 5 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?
3. You can get 10,000 dollars but it can potentially result in 5 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?
4. You can get 100 Million dollars but it can potentially result in 3 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?
5. What if you are broke and have a child to support?
Your reply is the equivalent of answering "If a genie grants you one single wish, what would it be?" with "I'll wish for a million wishes" :-)
And your reply subscribes to moral relativism too ('If I give them $x each, then it is okay to delay them. What is a few minutes anyway?'). Also note that $x that you are suggesting to give per person times 100 is just 1% of your gain. You don't know how much you cost them with the few minutes of delay that you caused. Perhaps someone missed a connecting flight and lost the chance to see his mom before she passed away.
If you push a button at a pedestrian crossing so you can cross the road, you're stopping potentially hundreds of cars just for your benefit. How much have you cost them? What if one of those is someone who's racing to the airport to catch a flight to see their mom who's about to pass away, and your decision to cross the road then delays them just enough to miss their flight?
Please note in my first comment I was replying to the statement: "Screw all theories of moral relativism; I can tell whether you're a good person or not by knowing how much money it would take to tempt you to leave an entire planeload of people sitting on the tarmac for an extra ten minutes." I tried to explain that he will become a moral relativist if the 'rewards' are high enough. In the second comment, I tried to explain that handing $10K to each doesn't correct it. It just makes you feel better. Still moral relativism.
Let's go with a smaller plane... My friend who is into airplanes tells me that 40 is a good estimate for shuttle planes from small cities to bigger hubs (30ish to 50ish, I just averaged them). So every 10 minutes you waste is about 6.5 man hours. Again valuing people's time at $10 per hour, you'd have to save $65 to break even (though that relies on pretty low valuation of the value of people's time).
Disregarding the infamous rich brats you see on TV, rich people are in general very frugal and do care about dimes and nickels. That's how many of them got rich in the first place.
And regardless, billionaires are in a minority.
college students that eat lots of ramen are already
valuing money more than their own health
Speaking as a college student, college students eat ramen today so they can eat ramen tomorrow instead of eating steak today and not eating tomorrow.
And when I say "tomorrow", I really mean the whole week.
I hope that the person at the airlines who came up with the pricing model is also bound by the same moral framework. Something like - how big a bonus does it need to tempt you in coming up with a scheme which robs thousands of customers of your employer an extra $5 for the next few years?
It's much like the drug user's rationalization of the fact that the money he spends goes to support organized crime. "Well," he says, "that's the government's fault for not legalizing the drugs I wish to take!"
I think I've decided where it leaves me: upset at both the bad-market creators and at the individuals who make choices knowing the ill-effects of those choices.