Originally Posted by synzero

I've been a B6 flyer since the beginning; I even did the October 2009 all you can jet promotion - now that was a fun month of flying all over the country. I even ended up going to one city twice. What I see is a decline in the soft product which is going to have a delayed impact on customer satisfaction. Most people are still going to report positive satisfaction because of the hard product plus memories of the way things used to be. I had stopped flying B6 regularly when I moved out of NYC but just started flying it again a lot this past year for work, and that’s when, perhaps through bad luck, I ran into a series of issues which I mentioned in my original post. The problem for me is not the specific issues but what it says about the attitude of management.

Basically it comes down to whether or not management thinks the way to get profitable is by nickel and diming both customers and employees, or is it by being efficient yet realizing that, as the famous quality control expert W Edwards Deming used to say: price is not cost - that is to say, sometimes being cheap can be much more expensive in the long run. The former attitude results in long-term gradual decline; the latter attitude is the way to sustainable success.

I'm reminded of this famous Deming story I read when I was much younger. He was called to this textile factory to advise them about how to improve productivity. A few months earlier, productivity had dropped but they couldn't figure out why. They had put up signs on the factory floor exhorting the seamstresses to work harder. It hadn't worked. He asked them; have you actually spoken with the seamstresses about why their productivity dropped? They said: er, no.

He went to the floor and asked the seamstresses if anything had changed a few months before. Yes, they said, for the last few months they had to deal with rethreading their machines a lot more frequently because the thread kept breaking. So, Deming went to the purchasing department and asked them if anything had changed a few months earlier: they said yes, management had come through demanding cost cutting so they switched from the ten cent thread to the nine cent thread.

Cost is not the price tag: this is something better managers understand. That’s why I’m switching, and why I’m willing to suffer for a year to get Platinum Medallion. For my purposes, since I buy my flights a couple months ahead, I think I've got a decent shot at Comfort+ at booking so I don't need to rely on upgrades closer to departure. But even if it weren’t for that, I would still switch.