WindowSeatFlyer

It's obvious that some people complain for the sake of complaining, and the less they know about something, the more sure they are that they know exactly what is going on.

the810

Except I'm not Swedish, only lived in Sweden for 1,5 years and I certainly wasn't integrated to the local society.

If locals felt that way, they would vote for something else. Instead they continue to support this model - and thousands of people from elsewhere are migrating into Nordics to enjoy local standard or living.

There is nothing suggesting that Nordic model doesn't work.

FlyingMoose

Sure, I've lived there for the past two decades. I haven't taken a sick day during that period and unlimited sickdays is a massive gap in productivity that gets heavily abused by Swedes. I don't think anyone at Systembolaget can tell me more about alcohol than I already know. Fortunately you can buy virtually all alcohol you desire cheaper online and can fully avoid Systembolaget but I hate not being able to pick up alcohol at the store like in every other European country or 24/7 liquor stores in the US. PostNord is only motivated by competition so when Airmee, Bring and Budbee started to eat into their package to store model and actually started to deliver at home they suddenly started to run faster but its a hit or miss still. Remember this was a development in 2019 while other Western countries have had package delivery for decades. Don't get me started on DHL or UPS here. Nothing is free, you are paying for someone else their university, healthcare and subsidized childcare whether you want to or not because its all in the taxes instead of letting people pay for their own life choices such as having children or getting a degree. Especially in a country that has a massive shortage of uneducated labor.

Spot on with the last sentence.

FlyingMoose

Why did you decide to leave again?

I think that's in the process of happening, we'll know in November.

the810

Because I have personal life elsewhere. I've only been there temporarily because of the pandemic.

I can absolute see myself living there long-term if I had different life circumstances.

GUWonder

I find the “Swedeschool” talk amusing since it seems so mis-rooted and misdirected. The Swedish schools are not what has caused SAS to go into bankruptcy. And the idea of Sweden being a broken mess and contributing to SAS’s problems is an absolute joke when looking at what is broken and has been breaking elsewhere in the developed world.

Swedish service levels are definitely ahead of what I would see 10-20 years ago in the country. They are also more consistent than in the US. While it may seem contradictory, this improvement in Swedish service also happened despite what I perceive to be a general decline and fragmentation in work ethic. Blame the internet. Ironically, even customer-facing SAS staff seem better on average now than 10-20+ years ago — and that’s even as they’ve been on a long management- and market-led forced march of delivering less to customers as part of company cost-cutting drives.

About the idea of the highest income group being better off in the US than Sweden, that may be limited to financial well being. There are other aspects of life that even a big bank account cannot make go away all so easily unless de-camping for another place.

GUWonder

….. if only some would makes the SAS management’s bankruptcy scheme into an election issue. Keep in mind that those oppositional sides screaming about Magdaprices and trying to act as if they are for the villa, volvo, vovve Svenssons aren’t interested in tossing away the “Nordic model” — they are primarily just interested in narrowing down to whom the model should apply.

the810

And that provides a better life for everyone, even the rich. Living in a free society improves lifes of everyone, even those who pay a bit more in taxes. If we let poor people get a great education, we will all profit from their work in the future, they will be the ones to improve society, discover new stuff and come up with great ideas. Not to mention that they will become net benefitors rather than someone living on benefits, they will create companies that will employ other people and pay lots and lots in taxes. It's almost an economical perpetum mobile and it's certainly much better idea than keeping education only available to rich, no matter how talentless they are and how much mess they'll cause when they get some responsibility.

Oh and you don't need to worry about going bankrupt if you get sick, without needing to work 20 hours a day (in which case you might as well kill yourself since you don't have any real life anyway).

Right. So you suggest we should throw talented people overboard and make them mop the floor because they don't come from a wealthy family. Remind me, when was the slavery abolished?

Edit: By the way, "uneducated labor" is gonna be less and less in demand as automation gets better. Any country focusing on price dumping low-qualification jobs will be in a huge trouble very soon (that includes my own that celebrates every new car factory as the greatest achievement ever, not realising that those people will end up on the street when their jobs are taken over by machines or a cheaper labor from Serbia).

steve harrington

Let's be honest, having an airline like SAS or a similar international airline, in the Nordic countries, is only capable of surviving with public capital behind it, look at Finnair, or look at Norwegian, a project that has lost more money than SAS in the last 10 years .

SAS has several problems that are difficult to solve, and I am not referring to the salary of the pilots, which is equal to or even lower than that of similar companies such as LH, IB, BA, even Alitalia (ITA), but to the lower qualified personnel, in comparison with other countries. and other lines, you can look for it, and SAS is by far the airline that costs its employees the most money, then you find that you have to set ticket prices, at the average European level, with Scandinavian salaries, and the accounts do not come out, although I do not know how the salaries will be after chapter 11.

On the other hand, if you want 3 hubs, you know that you are going to lose money, and pay strange contracts for electric planes that will never arrive, probably, pressured by the states against environmentalism.

In any case, the states have not invested as much in SAS as it seems, any flag carrier in bad times has lost much more, and whenever the Swedish/Danish/Norwegian states have put up money, they have put it up late and wrong, so I think they are to blame as well.

In any case, losing SAS and depending on foreign companies can be a problem, especially in the long run, we will see what ends up happening, but on a reputational level this has harmed SAS, and also the image of the Nordic states.

GUWonder

Flag carriers do tend to end up as financial basket cases. But even when common carriers are publicly traded companies whose cap table doesn’t have government shareholders as very large shareholders, they still have financial problems. Among the US3 airlines, how many times have they gone into bankruptcy? Repeatedly. And without all those government-backed allowances for cross-firm price-fixing, it would probably be sooner than later for their next round of Chapter 11.

the810

Or by focusing on customers who are willing to pay more. Instead SAS thinks it's a good idea to make holiday traffic its priority. You get better frequency with them to Mallorca than to many European capitals.

Why though? We're obviously talking about EU airlines as only they have traffic rights to carry people within EU (with the exception of few odd fifth freedom routes) and they aren't really foreign. It's like saying it could be a problem for Arizona to rely on New York based airline.

fassy

Well, don’t want to bash Sweden as I really love this country but you bring up a good example. As a true wine lover, Systembolaget is a nightmare. No! Most employees have absolutely no idea about the wine they are selling. They can just read to you what is written on the label and the store card. Have you ever been to a good wine shop in northern CA like KL Wines or a good German, Italien or French guy? These guys know what they are talking about… I have yet to meet a Systembolaget employee which knows their stuff… example: I recently asked for Marsala and the girl had no idea what I was talking about. Which is kind of super basic stuff for a liquor dealer, right?

And it actually starts with the problem that Systembolaget doesn’t even buy great wines. Well… they do… the Systembolaget close to the embassies in Stockholm carry a pretty impressive stock of very expensive wine. But for the rest of the country…. It is cheap and blunt mass produced wine. Which you can buy in any grocery shop in Germany, Denmark or Poland (just to name a few countries around) for a fraction of the cost. And probably with the same amount of help from the store clerks.

But somehow, someone established the myth that Systembolaget employees are real connoisseurs and know their stuff. I have to meet one of these guys yet. Just because a lot of people say it, doesn’t make it so.

same for spirits or other stuff. Come on… they don’t even carry Amaro Ramazzotti. They just don’t. A very basic but common Italien drink. No matter if you like it or not. Yea, you can order it. It tried that once… took 6 weeks until I finally got the message “sorry we couldn’t get it and canceled your order”. Or the poor selection of gin. Yeah, they have the usual industrial stuff like Sapphire, Gordon’s, Hendrick’s or Tanqueray… but real good small batch gins? No way. You just cannot get it.

And here we are… instead of complaining why a state-run monopoly cannot even manage to order and distribute regular and not that absurd things like Ramazzotti people in Sweden say “it’s fine, I just don’t drink it”

i mean… what the hell?

It is not that I’m dead set on getting those things (and found my ways around it). But be real, the system is not that great. It is pretty messed up and doesn’t work well.

so why are people saying it is great? That is what I just don’t get.

GUWonder

Some parties have less tolerance for criticism than others. Sometimes it comes out like this: “since you told us one thing that was done wrong, tell us three things that were done right”. Positive reinforcement is great. But trying to dilute an issue and avoid acknowledgment of the issue and need for improvement makes it harder to sustainably improve the outcome sooner than later. Perhaps that kind of dynamic was part of SAS’s corporate culture leading up to SAS’s going for Chapter 11. However, that is mild compared to how it too often goes and will continue to go with the corporate boardroom and the corporate boardroom culture of the good old boys (and gals) scratching each other’s backs.

What will be the circumstances of SAS CEO’s own “Et tu Brutus” fall from power?

steve harrington

referring to the first, In this you are absolutely right, it already had another of the thousands of crises years ago and they focused on passenger business (I think from the 90s) and it worked, what's more, I think that at some point in its history it was considered the best airline in the world as a service, just like SwissAir

In the second I think differently, you will be able to cover economically beneficial routes, it is true with low cost basically, but no they will give you the umbrella of routes of a network airline, the airlines of the network, thanks to the main Hub, there are other routes that if they weren't off the grid, they wouldn't have them, and the low-cost ones couldn't have them because they don't make sense to them, not to mention intercontinental connectivity, Finnair isn't going to come and put a hub in Copenhagen, and Norwegian can't even make a connection because it is not in any alliance and its size is ridiculous, and it loses the same money or more than SAS, not to mention that they depend on third parties for strategic connectivity, but it is my humble opinion.

Forgive my patatero english

tr3k

US is a lot more uniform. If you were abducted, blindfolded, driven around for a few days and dumped out at a random location without a mobile phone - you'd be hard pressed to figure out what state you are in simply looking at nearby strip malls. It's the same Walmart and Dollar Tree everywhere. So yes, it doesn't much matter where the airline is headquartered (but also because it has staff, from ground handlers to FAs and pilots) from all over the country.

That's not yet (fortunately) the state of things in Europe. So it does, clearly, matter, where the airline is based - in terms of control, finances, staff and culture.

It could be worse - SK could have been a part of LH group (which reduced even previously good airlines to mediocrity)