I wonder if one of the reasons that customer service hasn't deteriorated so badly in the airline industry at least among ground personnel, is the sheer volume of customers with whom a limited number of customer service reps must deal. In certain settings the organizational science and business school nostrums about "getting to 'yes'" and all the rest are fairly easy to make work provided the employees are decently trained and rewarded, regardless of whether they are unionized. And lets face it, in most instances the reward people want is money. Flight attendants are not members of a religious order. The reason the clerk in Safeway says "hello, can I help you find something" is because his union negotiated work rules specify that if you've come within a certain distance of him or her, he or she has to recite the script, not because they actually give a rat's ... about you. In order to avoid falling afoul of the secret shopper, the clerk recites the script. (It kind of creeps me out actually; I generally don't have a problem asking "where's the salami" unprompted.)

When you've got hordes of people trying to get on an oversold flight to Duluth, a weather delay and god knows what else going wrong and there are two of you checking in coach passengers, time and other very real constraints make it close to impossible to turn everybody's bad attitude around in the time that you've got.

And lets not kid ourselves, we've had a palpable decline in civility and decent behavior, not over the last 50 years but over the last decade. Stand at an intersection in any busy city and count the cars that gun their engines on the yellow light and speed through the red, or watch as drivers ignore screaming emergency vehicle sirens, or as a customer stands and chats on the cell phone as a clerk is trying to assist them.

And we all want to fly for free or close to it. I'm not an expert, but I imagine that there is not a lot of fat in most airlines these days to pay for top flight - excuse the pun- and recurrent training experiences for their customer service staff, or to offer anything other than a crowded, uncomfortable travel experience with no amenities overseen by sullen, despondent flight attendants. There are exceptions of course, both individuals and companies. But If the unions were gone tomorrow, paying someone $7.50 an hour means you're going to get someone who is not invested in the success of their employer. Fire that person and you'll get someone else at a low rate who is not invested in the company's success. I've had countless instances of badly trained call center people give me what I in my limited knowledge knew to be the wrong information just to get me off the phone and had to call back a few times until I've gotten someone who understood some complex fare rule. But can you reasonably expect expertise at these wages and limited training?

I've gone on way too long when all I wanted to say is that their is not a single source for the problem. There are many convergent sources.