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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

Not captured in numbers or the article, but I've noticed service becoming a lot poorer, though perhaps the downward trend has stopped for now. Between 2021-2024 or so, I encountered a lot of people working for airlines (gate agents, flight attendants, etc.) who really went out of their way to make me feel like they're doing me a favor by letting me fly on their plane.

That's not to say that the average airline worker is like that; it just seemed like the bottom fell out, so that the floor on what my worst experience could be while flying became substantially worse compared to times before.

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Flying before every country dropped covid restrictions was really just a degree of bliss that I'll never again attain in my life. Tickets at rock bottom prices, booking just one seat but having a full row to stretch out and sleep on, nobody in front of or behind me, meals being oddly good for some reason (maybe desperate to appeal to customers or not needing to make as many meals with little ingredients?). 2020-2023 was peak travel.

Economic inefficiency can feel really good. Personally experiencing tens of billions of dollars of capital investment designed for a capacity 50x as high, temporarily priced way below what it should be due to a market shock? Sign me up!

I’ll never forget going on a business trip where the restrictions were in place on the way there and had dropped by the time of my return flight.

I was so mad.

I flew probably 30 times during covid restrictions, and as you say, it was absolute bliss. That return flight reminded me why flying was miserable before COVID restrictions and is miserable now.

Less than half-full planes were very frequent prior to the big airline mergers in the 2010's. The loss of US Air, Contentintal, and Air Tran has completely ruined air travel. On most domestic flights, the middle seat was for children or unoccupied.

In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers, and it seems like it might actually be deeper than that (extending throughout young people's attitudes towards their jobs).

In my experience, there has been a widespread decline in how customers treat service personnel.

There is just a widespread kindness gap in our society.

Quite right, I'm sure. But the part that I'm more interested about is why it feels like the floor got so much lower? I don't know that the average interaction in public (in any context, not just flying) is any or substantially worse, but it seems like the variation to the downside got more extreme.

Young people feel (either really or they have been convinced) that employers don't care about them, pay them slave wages, and will generally abuse them so they feel the same way in return -- no loyalty, no care other than getting the next paycheck.

If you live that way, it may feel good in the short term but in the long term you just screw yourself over. Everything to you becomes transactional, and you miss out on benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty. And you will never feel you are “owed” anything by anyone because you never did anything to warrant payback. Far less people will be good to you if you aren’t good to them.

I wish young people knew this, but they will find out too late in life.

> Everything to you becomes transactional

The employer/employee relationship is basically by definition transactional.

SOME employers do reward hard work and going above-and-beyond, but it's becoming more and more rare.

The simple fact is, giving raises and promoting top performers is not good for shareholder value.

> benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty

The company I work at just laid off ~100 people. One was from my team and was a great worker that took on additional responsibilities and worked extra hours to get things done. Still got let go. How's that for rewarding loyalty?

> In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers

This hasn't been my experience at all. And to be quite frank, whenever I see someone claim this, my cynical misanthropic brain assumes that's what's ACTUALLY happening is that customers are asking for exceptions beyond policy that customer service personnel can't give them and then claim they're getting poor service or that the customer service rep was rude for telling them "no" on something.

I worked retail and fast food for over 10 years. People suck. And while I got out of that industry 13 years ago, I know that people have only gotten worse. People demand the world and then complain about poor service when they don't get it.

some "People suck."

Some people suck so much that the average works out to "suck".

It doesn't help that it's a weighted average. The people who don't suck tend to require fairly little time. (In fact, many of them may well suck, too, but you don't have time to notice.) The people who suck a lot always require a lot of your time.

As a teenager, I worked at a big box store that figured out how to monetize this: The department I worked in had a blank on the pricing form marked "Hand Placement Fee" that our company trainer taught us to call the "PIA Charge"

We were instructed to upcharge customers for being jerks, and use our own judgement to determine the fee.

I suspect this is employee burnout from repeatedly seeing their coworkers laid off and being told to "do more with less."

The airlines -- like all other MBA-run businesses now -- are titrating their services: They cut staff and pay and quality until customers start to loudly complain or leave and then they restore just enough staff or quality until the shouting stops.

They do this repeatedly in a closed feedback loop. Any CEO that doesn't work this way in the modern era gets fired.

I was in Italy recently and got chatting to one of the airport employees. She said she'd been working in airlines/airports for 20 years and it was fucked as a career because wages were decreasing, hours increasing, shifts getting less predictable, career/permanent staff being replaced by agency workers/temps and she had run out of fucks to give.

As a career, working in aviation is extremely hierachical and seniority based. If you're old, chances are you started making an okay amount of money and now are making absolute bank. Years of collective agreements and contracts have seniority king. If you're a new employee though it seems to be really shitty. The system is entirely tipped against you.

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