United discontinuing inflight duty free sales.
 

http://unitedafa.org/news/details.aspx?id=17708

Not surprised with this no one really uses it anymore.

Don't think anyone here will be terribly saddened by this... :p

Not surprised and won't be missed (by me) but I find the speed rather fast: less than two weeks from announcement to implementation? That's quite radical.
Printed material is also still out there.

Will be some interesting interactions between FAs and potential shoppers on........wait for it.......April 1st!

I assume this is so that the FAs will have more time to come by and see if I need a drink refill. :)

Now if they can just stop hawking the Mileage Plus Visa card...

Yay!

Thousands of pax a day will now be spared the annoyance of having their IFE or sleep interrupted by FAs flogging "Duty free will be available", "Duty free is available", "We'll be coming down the aisle with duty free soon", "duty free will only be available for a few more minutes", "Duty free is closing" announcements.

^ ^ ^

Found announcements VERY annoying :(

Plus I felt for FAs having to hawk the stuff.

I'll bet UA duty free would be more successful if there were UA-branded merchandise (like model airplanes) for sale... current iteration of the duty free magazine is just full of crap.

Now if only we could buy DF liquids in HKG and bring them back to the US... love how the GA said, "Well, you can't bring alcohol or perfume, but they sell that in flight anyway." LOL.

:D:D Good one.

There goes the 10% discount for 1Ks. No doubt this is another deliberate takeaway of benefits for UA's very best "HVF"s.

I'm guessing Duty Free isn't particularly high-margin considering the weight/administration/catering relative to sparse sales. I think I've bought only one thing from Duty Free on any airline in the last 25 years. It won't be missed by the vast majority of flyers.

...and I did not know FAs got commissions.

Something Delta did quite a while ago...

Good riddance.

I found the announcements to be quite annoying, and I'd suspect that in general, the sales didn't justify lugging all that junk around. Then again, maybe the space and weight will allow more cargo/passengers.

haha, funny...a year and a bit ago, I was flying on SQ, and entertainment system wasn't working for me and my wife. Comp they gave us was 75 SGD each toward duty free - apparently that's the only way they will compensate.

So we found a few things, including the model SQ plane to purchase. Turns out they didn't stock the SQ plane (as well as one of the other two things we wanted) - FA said they haven't seen the model SQ plane onboard for quite a while.