la2clt

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlot...s/12062566.htm

Airline pitches in-flight pretzels (not as in marketing pitches!)

"Passengers are not driven by whether there are pretzels there or no pretzels there..."

DeacDiggler

Good. I don't like pretzels anyway.

GoodTimePete

Yeah, no big loss, i usually didn't take them anyway...a FA told me about this yesterday (as I was sitting in F/C eating chips and drinking vodka sodas....) She was really bumeed out and said she was going to retire said everything is terrible (for her at least) She wont get any retirement money and seemed bitter - but did act very nice.

GotCalcio4

This really doesn't make much sense. Although it is true, most people aren't booking flights based on which airline offers pretzels or not, but lets look at the big picture. US is trying to combat almost $300 million in annual losses by saving $1 million in pretzels costs? Get real . . .

PineyBob

The Executive bonus payout of appriximately 21 MILLION translates into 21 YEARS of free pretzels.

So I ask you which is more important?? 21 Million in snacks for the people who pay your salary OR the looting of the Treasury for personal gain

deelmakur

Further descent into the theater of the ridiculous. With a little effort, they could find some smaller producer needing brand awareness, to provide them either more cheaply, or in a full barter for distribution and mention. Anheuser Busch did that with Eagle snacks for years. What's next, renting the seat belts?

shinbal

Agreed.

Any decent marketing person worth his salt (sorry 'bout that one) could have closed a pretzel deal with a four-page powerpoint presentation. Snyder's of Hanover, close to the PHL region, is in a major promotional mode. Surely someone could have gotten them to bite. (sorry again).

BrokesiliaFlyer

... but on the plus side I've been told that Snack Boxes will now be for sale on Express flights over 1.5 hours!

jimcfsus

I was in the BLF Sam's Club today and saw a box of 30 1.5 oz bags of Snyder's pretzels like US uses for $5.76. Granted these were bigger than the bags that US uses (aren't they like 0.5 oz?). But let's play with this...

So even if they got 20 cents a bag from US, let's see, .20 into a million is how many bags? 5 million? That's a lot of pretzels... and I would be safe to guess US doesn't pay 20 cents a bag for those pretzels.

jetsetter

I would recommend that some of you try UA. I think it is a funner airline, etc. For example, on a BOS to ORD flight they serve a hot sandwich which was one of the meal choices on real glass and with real glass cups. They also have a nice snack mix in first class.

It is sad how US has completely gutted its product line and brand. Particularly e.g. the shuttle is nothing like it used to be. They don't even use dedicated equipment anymore. There is a good article on Salon's Ask The Pilot about the decline of US Airways service which I have linked to another thread previously. I still think for especially CP Envoy Class is good, (e.g. double upgrade from coach to Envoy to row 1) but domestically they have totally gutted the product they offer.

My main travel route is in the BOS to WAS coridor, and it is most convenient to fly BOS to DCA, but I have now 90% of the time flown BOS to IAD on UA for about 1/3 the price and a better overall flying experience. Another shuttle regular told me he as well felt the product had been totally gutted.

I guess the old USAir only lives in the terminals as ghosts of a bygone era. There are still some great people, but the ship overall is sinking from a passenger perspective. But let the band play. When PHX comes in and manages the place, maybe it will be better, I don't know.

Getting back to pretzels I would occasionally enjoy them with a beer, and it seems silly to elliminate them. I really miss the gold fish from the 1990's snack basket.

Also in the last chapter of the book:
The Airport: Terminal Nights and Runway Days at John F. Kennedy International
there is a very well written piece about the sort of decline and slow death of aviation as we once knew it. Let's see if I can pull up an excerpt:
Yes I can, here you go:

"Leaving

Terminal One t the end of September at Kennedy, there is a slowdown in traffic after the summer peak, and late on a weekday afternoon, the airport is relatively
quiet. The long, thin clouds in the bright-blue sky are slate-colored; the sun is warm and the wind is cold. The doomed terminal is silent. The terminal
used to be Eastern's; by the time you read this, it will be gone, razed, history, soon to be replaced by a shiny new glass-and-steel building, even cleaner
than B.A's white box, constructed by a consortium consisting of Japan Airlines, Lufthansa, Air France, Korean Air, and Iberia.

On this end-of-September afternoon, though, Terminal One still exists, all marble and travertine and onyx and brass and towering windows and dusty gathered
drapes and late-fifties-style defunct elegance. October '59 was when they opened the place, and thirty-five years isn't a bad run for a building these
days, especially at the airport. There are ghosts here. This is where the families and friends of the passengers of Flight 66 waited and waited, and found
out; this is where a million winter trips down to Miami and the Caribbean, licit and otherwise, began and ended. Pappagallo shoes and Meledandri suits,
Ban-Lon and polyester.

Sharkskin and blue jaws. Stingy-brim hats. My Sin and Brut and White Shoulders and Aqua Velva. All that's left is the walls and the high, wide space.
Doomed. A couple of charter companies are leasing gates here in the meantime, and a carrier called MGM Grand, also doomed as far as regularly scheduled
flights are concerned (in January 1993 it would go all-charter), but for the time being a flicker of the past, when flying was for the lucky few. (snip)"


MGM, in its brief history, flew exclusively between New York and Los Angeles, and it was a thing of beauty: The flights were always undersold, and the cheaper
seats in the back of the renovated DC-8s were much better than most business-class seats-wide, and upholstered in an ugly but strangely nostalgic pinkish
leather. The planes were kept scrupulously clean; each of the large, carpeted lavatories contained gold-colored sink fixtures and flowers in a small vase.

"All right, it was Vegas; but Vegas in a good way. The food was better than passable, the liquor flowed freely, and cruising home in the clear light over
the middle of America, sipping Chardonnay and listening to Stan Getz play "Au Privave" on the headphones, you might be forgiven for thinking you had achieved
airline Nirvana.

Of course it had to end; all those underbooked flights were wonderful for the nerves but hell on the bankbooks of Kirk Kerkotian, the Las Vegas billionaire
and the airline's backer. But this is shortly before the end, and you're on the evening flight to the coast, and just now you've just left your cab, and
you're heading for the MGM desk in the expanse of the terminal's main room. Suddenly a guy appears at your side, in a tailored black uniform: he has a
baby face, a face out of Little Archie comics, and his hair is a flattop sculpture in brown and gold. "MGM Grand Air?" he asks.

"How'd you know?" you say.

He smiles. "Just call it a sixth sense," he says.

You go to a desk where he takes your ticket and checks it against his manifest. A smiling woman in the same black uniform appears, and the Little Archie
guy says, "Have a nice flight, sir," and pats you on the back. (snip)"

"But before you get there, you see late sunlight streaming out an open doorway, and inside there's a bar, a big room with floor-to-ceiling windows, a television
mounted on the wall by the windows, a bored bartender, and four customers. Two of the customers are middle-aged ladies, sitting quietly with their Manhattans
and staring at the TV, which is showing the confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court justice.

Ted Kennedy's spherical head fills the screen. The other two customers are a middle-aged man and a pretty young woman.
(snip)
You go back out into the hall, buy a Post, and return to the bar.

Sit down with your beer and the paper at a table with a view of the television and the big windows. Outside the windows, planes taxi by; the electric-colored
sky is huge. The disputatious couple leave; you drink your beer. The light coming through the windows is golden, and so is the beer; in a minute the edge
is off your flying nerves.

Another minute and, your stomach empty, you really feel the alcohol.

You read an item on Page Six about a new UFO book, and glance up at the TV screen, where ALFa puppet alien, is talking with an air force colonel, who is
asking A.L.F if the family, by any chance, has any extraterrestrials in the house. You glance at your watch. Just past six. You leave some coins and the
paper on the table and walk, slightly unsteadily, through the dark hall, which somehow smells like 1964. Back to the lounge. A few people have shown up,
and they're gathering their things. Time to board. The people from the firstclass lounge across the way emerge, and you all form a line of perhaps a
dozen. You show your ticket to the bored security woman, take your keys out of your pocket, put them on the proffered salver, and pass uneventfully through
the metal detector as your carry-on gets a half-glance from another weary-looking woman; you walk down the hall to where a slim young man in black, his
blond hair as high as a souffle, smiles brightly and says, "Good evening, sir!" As you stride up the loading bridge to the plane, you notice that the woman
in front of you is a well-known television news personality She, of course, goes up to the front of the plane. But there's nothing wrong back here. You
sit down and stretch out in the wide pink seat. Chopin's Barcarolle is playing over the plane's speakers. You buckle your gold seatbelt buckle and accept
a Champagne from the attendant-who, in just a few months, will be looking for work.

Nor will you ever fly this way again.

Just after 6:30, only three minutes late, the plane pushes back from the gate, past a sign that reads NO INTERNATIONAL TRASH, out taxiway November and onto
the outer perimeter road.

Since the weather is fine, and the wind is out of the south and east this evening, and since 13 Right, the usual departure runway, is chockablock with traffic,
you've been cleared to take off on 13 Left, at the other side of the airport. So you taxi down past the terminals that were once described as jewels on
a necklace: Terminal One and Northwest and what used to be the Pan Am Worldport and is now Delta.

The jewels have faded, but in the sunset light, in a Champagne haze, they look magical once more. Then the road turns left, and you roll past the back of
the I.A.B, past the hardstands where the 747s sit, their tails painted with the blazons of international aviation-LOT and Ladeco and Avianca and Lufthansa
and KLM and Japan Air. Under their wings, the ramp rats scurry. Beneath the asphalt, the Jet-A flows through singing pipes. A blue-and-white P.A cruiser
drives by, in no special hurry, the mind of the cop at the wheel on Lotto combinations.

Inside the I.A.B, smiling Colombian killers with phony passports and shy Russian children with wide eyes and quiet Lebanese women with covered heads enter America for the first time. Up in the tower, a controller with a head cold munches a stale doughnut and talks and talks to men and women in the sky
Left again. Past Eero Saarinen's poem in concrete, TWA International poem no longer noticed much, as the airline struggles to survive-and past the more prosaic TWA Domestic and British[United's white box and on to taxiway Alfa. The lights are coming on at the airport: the deep-blue perimeter lights along the taxiway, the red-and-white runway signs and black-and-yellow taxiway signs glowing within, the yellow-and-green in-pavement hold bars, the pink-orange
mercury-vapors behind the terminals, the white beacon atop the tower.

You're third in line, behind a United 757 and an American Eagle commuter. To the left, alongside the runway, stand the big cargo buildings of Korean Air and Federal Express and J.A.L. Crates and containers will vanish into unauthorized hands tonight. You go. Down the runway, faster and faster, up toward 180 knots, as the engines crescendo and you look at your watch: You're up in twenty-five seconds, a light load tonight. Now you're rising, with a slight leftward tilt, the wing blue and orange in the sunset light, and the engines are making that tunneling noise they make as you climb. You cross filthy Thurston
Basin, where the S A S plane went into the drink in '84, and Rockaway Boulevard, where Flight 66 smacked down. But you're up, you're safe, and our pilot-who used to work for Eastern, who has white hair in his y ears, who is worrying (again) about unemployment and (always) about his prostate-flips the switches
that make the gear doors thunk closed, the flaps retract into the wings. Over the invisible line from Queens into Nassau County, the dense grid of Long Island washed with dying sun and dotted with crime lights.

Cars and roads everywhere, dozens of tiny pairs of headlights picking bravely through the rising dark. You pass over Hewlett Bay Park and Woodmere and Hewlett, over my grandparents' old houses, large and small, then turn north and fly over Captain Len Klasmeier's place in Valley Stream. And then up over what they used to call the Hempstead Plains, high above the shopping malls and subdivisions that crowd what once were the quiet potato fields where Glenn Curtiss
and Lindbergh and a thousand lost barnstormers flew.

Bank left, into the sun, as the burning towers of the city wheel away.

And then, there, two miles below and ten miles to the south, is Kennedy once again, in miniature, with all its lights on, and-seemingly comprehensible
at last. Working. And beyond it the oil-dark sea."