Digging

There’s an ancient joke – it must be at least a century old by now – that goes “Once you’ve done [specific outrageous thing] what are you going to do for an encore?” The basic concept goes back to Vaudeville, where any really good performance would call for an encore, and a performer would have to come up with something new to keep their audience’s approval, but the joke has been applied to everything from Internet start-ups (Once you’ve made several billion dollars before you turn 30…) to artistic accomplishment (Once you’ve won the Nobel Prize for Literature for your first novel…). I don’t usually use it in business, because it’s annoying and not very helpful, but in this case I have to ask: “Once you’ve offended a customer enough that he wrote and recorded a song about you, and the video of it has been viewed over 12 million times on YouTube, and people all over the world are mocking you, what are you going to do for an encore?”

In the case of United Airlines, it would appear that the answer is: “Run out of toilet paper during an International flight…”

You can pick up the original story from the Daily Finance site if you want to, but the basic facts are simple enough. On a flight from San Francisco to London a United Airlines flight ran out of toilet paper and had to put a stack of cocktail napkins in one of the lavatories. It’s one of those stories that would be a lot funnier in a business that doesn’t operate complex machinery at 520 knots flying 30,000 feet over major population centers. As it is, you have to wonder what other details the company is letting slip. Granted that servicing the lavatories isn’t as important as servicing the engines, or that running out of toilet paper isn’t as much of a problem as running out of fuel, hydraulic fluid, or even food and water, it’s not a good detail to forget – and it happened in an industry where a reputation for NOT forgetting the details is critical…

Now, I’m not going to suggest that the fact that one of the workers responsible for servicing an airplane forgot to check on a basic supply level means that the company is in any greater danger of a catastrophic crash than they already were. Nobody runs preflight checks on the toilet paper supply (the way they do on fuel and hydraulics and such) precisely because the penalty for failure isn’t nearly as high. Similarly, baggage handlers are not monitored and supervised as closely (or paid as well) as maintenance personnel or flight crews because if they screw up and damage a passenger’s $5,000 guitar the worst you’re going to have to endure as a result is 12 million views of a video that mocks you, not tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits from the families of the crash victims. The problem is that from a business standpoint this is a difference of degree, not a different concern…

If a company cares so little about my comfort and satisfaction that they can’t afford to have a supervisor with a checklist double-check the between-flight servicing of the airplane, why should I believe that they care about my health, wellbeing, property, on-time arrival or ultimately even survival? If they are willing to cut corners to this extent, where do they draw the line? Why should I believe that they care in the least whether or not I make my connecting flight? Given a scenario where it would be more profitable to settle a lawsuit with my heirs than it would to get me safely to my destination, how can I be sure they wouldn’t just take the higher profits?

It’s always a mistake to ask how much worse things can get, or how much lower someone would be willing to go – because there’s always someone who will go lower. In the case of United Airlines, however, I would have to say that they have now hit bottom – and are starting to dig…