Originally Posted by
PAL62V
It's less about the quality of products and more about the way a company like BA bends its own rules or creates its rules so that everything is in favour of the company, leaving the consumer having to jump thru hoops to get something sorted. How many hundreds of topics on this forum alone pertain to wrong customer advice, BA shirking from its responsibilities only to be proven later to be wrong, info being withheld from travellers who are not as savvy as many on FT? This is what breeds the contempt that many feel towards businesses. And in fact the OP was talking about the compensation not just from the tomato juice but from the failure of the IFE. Now set aside the tomato juice for a moment, the IFE failure has nothing to do with cheaper shoes made in China or furniture built down to a price. It's understandable that failure happens however the way an airline often treats its bog standard, Y class low status pax only drives someone to try and claw something back when an advertised feature of the ticket price does not materialise.
It's very easy for anyone to self-justify any opinion they have on the subject PAL62V. Could I not argue that the IFE was probably made in China? That the passenger's unwillingness to pay a higher price resulted in the airline buying a lower cost IFE? There is a difference between 'getting what you pay for' which is how you are looking at it and 'getting what you deserve' which is how I am looking at it.
We live today in a world where just about every transaction we are involved in is seen as adversarial. Customers complain every company is trying to rip them off and every company complains every customer wants something for nothing. Both have some truth in them. But it was not always that way. I am old enough to remember when business was done on a handshake. Nowadays, business is done according to laws and contracts written by lawyers. What do lawyers do when they write a contract? They write it to the benefit of their client! So when you say the airlines write their own rules to favour the airline, why would you find that unfair? If you wrote the contract, who would it favour? I think we all know the answer to that question.
The problem is not with the airline or the individual passenger, it is with the adversarial culture we live in. Once again, I will say that the people get what the people deserve.