This Will Not End Well...

Another common Internet meme of the past few years is a high-speed picture of what is about to become a catastrophic accident – or some combination of factors that could cause one – and the phrase “This will not end well…” employed as a caption. Most often these are intended to be humorous – a picture of a person who has just fallen off of a BMX bicycle during a jump, for example, or a mid-air shot of a cat falling into a pool of water. In a business or operations context, however, we often borrow the concept to express skepticism about a business model that has an obvious weak spot. For example, if your business model depends on random customers being courteous, generous, cooperative, or anything other than random, greedy paranoids, you are likely to experience problems; if your business requires that people not act purely in their own selfish interest it’s just possible to succeed – but there is an excellent chance that things will not end well…

Now, I’m not suggesting that every daring, chancy or idealistic business concept will invariably come to grief. The Panera Bread stunt where patrons are allowed to name their own price and the profits go to charity seems to be working, for example, and Radiohead seems to have done just fine with their “pay whatever you want to” stunt for their last album (they made something like 400% of what they would have made on a conventional release of the same number of copies). That said, I still can’t help thinking that Malaysia Airlines is going to have trouble with their announced new policy of banning infants from the First-Class section of its airliners…

Regular readers of this space (assuming I have regular readers) will recall that I’ve speculated about airlines having a special section for families travelling with small children in past blogs. However, if the story that broke this week on The NBC Affiliate station in Rochester, New York (by way of the MSNBC web site) is correct, Malaysia Airlines is going about it the other way, banning infants from the front of the cabin where people are paying ten to twenty times more for their seats. On the one hand, you could see this working – people who are paying that kind of money for airline tickets are going to complain a lot more when they can’t sleep because the baby behind them won’t stop screaming for 14 hours straight, or whatever. On the other hand, you can see this being a huge problem – because anybody who has that kind of money to spend on airline tickets is probably used to getting their own way, and they’re not going to take kindly to being told they can’t sit up front with their infant…

For the moment, this is being limited to long-haul routes from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam, London and Sydney, and should not run into either U.S. laws or the type of American so widely parodied abroad who can’t understand why the whole world doesn’t enjoy listening to their infant shrieking as much as they do. However, the same article notes that other carriers (including Virgin Atlantic and British Airways) are considering applying the same policy to entire flights, and they do operate from U.S. airports – which means that sooner or later they’re going to be sued for discrimination against infants, parents with small children, or anyone else who cares to hire an attorney and bring on the lawsuit. If such flights become popular, however, there’s a non-zero chance that customers who like such flights will counter-sue, trying to block the original actions and keep infant-free flights available…

Either way, I can’t help thinking that there is going to be even more trouble ahead for an industry that is not doing well in terms of customer satisfaction these days. Or, as the meme puts it, This Will Not End Well…