Originally Posted by
JulesWinfield
The funny thing is that they don’t need to invest a lot of money to make the product better. The middle managers here are terrible. The ramp and gate managers who are above the grunt supervisors are nowhere to be found. They could drive a lot of change just by doing things they should already be doing, like making sure the expensive PCAs are hooked up and working, getting rid of the horrible gate agents, and handing IROPs better.
This is a good point, you almost never see anyone in kahkis out on the ramp. Nor do you see someone in a suit at a gate with a severely delayed flight and a huge line. I'm sure these people exist but they don't seem very proactive.
It's a pretty good job and as long as we don't take concessions hopefully it will stay that way until I retire. For my tiny part I'll do what I can to make the passenger experience as good as I can. But I'm going to stay in my lane.
As others have mentioned, our current senior management and probably all generations since Crandall are happy being Walmart (low margin but absolutely massive). The problem with this strategy is Walmart has over 10,000 stores and Target has less than 2,000. So if we were 5 times bigger than United or Delta then we could be a low margin juggernaut. Instead we're just a low margin also-ran.
Hopefully we'll get a serious shake up someday and get a leadership team with vision.