Originally Posted by
MatthewLAX
The problem was passengers drank far too much wine - it broke the UA budget. Horrible forecasting by UA.
It wasn't as much the quantity drank, as it was the sampling ... as in any open dining / open bar concept, people will try and sample more things when they are proactively offered. The wine flights and Bloody Mary carts did stimulate a huge amount of waste, so I understand trimming back these offerings. The oft-quoted "passenger demands for our wine surged 300%" was less about demand, and more about waste. In a two-zone J cabin with four aisle carts, there was a lot of waste.
So much of the original Polaris concept was un-necessary flair, and many of us gave feedback to that effect. Problem is, as you say, once given it is hard to taketh away. Management got the extreme willies on the wine front, and the pendulum swang the other way where there is "bare bones" sparse roundtrip provisioning of wine. They've decided it's ok to say "sorry, we don't have it", have the FAs in apology mode, and go from there.
They can't sift through all of the Polaris expense line items (PJs, slippers, bedding, wine, food, staffing etc) to any level of specificity ... it's easier to apply the hatchet / haircut method and chop everything.