- LGBT murders in Brazil up 55 percent. Trans people and sex workers have been particularly targeted: “‘A transvestite is 259 times more likely to be murdered than a gay man,’ says the study which is based on media reports, since there are no official statistics on hate crimes in Brazil.” I’d assume a study based on media reports is understating the true extent of the problem, since not every murder is reported.
- Meowser’s post on airlines charging fat people extra is the best I’ve read on the subject. Go read this is you have any interest in the issue at all. She also brings up a factor that I haven’t seen any news reports mention: this is an issue in part because the airlines have been making the seats narrower and narrower in recent years.
- Slut-Shaming From Sextexting Leads To Teen Suicide. So horrible. And as Renee says, “This is not about sextexting, this is about gender based harassment and slut shaming.”
- Define Rich! “We have lost our definition of rich and I believe it was done intentionally. If you are rich, then what better camouflage is there than to undefine “rich”? And, what better way to undefine “rich” than to have an argument accepted that “rich” can not really be defined?”
- Malcolm Gladwell, “Black Like Them.” “The success of West Indians is not proof that discrimination against American blacks does not exist. Rather, it is the means by which discrimination against American blacks is given one last, vicious twist: I am not so shallow as to despise you for the color of your skin, because I have found people your color that I like. Now I can despise you for who you are.” Via Ta-Nahisi.
- It’s too cute, my brain may just explode.
When capitalized, "Sie" is the formal way to address adults of either gender in polite German. I majored in the…
Airlines have reduced both width and “pitch” (space between your seatback and that of the person in front of you) in order to crowd more seats on each plane, thereby allowing them to be highly competitive on pricing. It’s not a recent change; a NYT article from 1990 is titled “You can’t be too thin in economy class.” Coach seats are now so cheap that selling them out makes just enough money for the airline to recover its costs for running the flight; it can’t turn a profit without the twice or thrice more expensive 1st and business class seats.
Whenever people talk about how nice plane travel was in the 1970s, I always think, “Do you remember how much it used to cost? The reason people dressed up for it and blue jeans were socially verboten is that it was economically out of reach for the working class and lower middle class.” Even into the 1980s, fares were high enough that my middle-to-upper middle class family drove for all our vacations except to India (and if Dad could have figured out where that land bride between Alaska and Russia had gone…).
My husband is over 6 ft and complains about being crammed like a sardine every time we fly coach, and I tell him the same thing I’m inclined to tell other people who don’t like the getting squeezed: pay for first/business class or fly JetBlue. In inflation-adjusted dollars, a non-refundable business class ticket is not going to be more than a coach ticket was in 1975.
Having done most of my flying in the era of airline price wars, I just don’t expect flying to be anything more than barely tolerable. I have no brand loyalty to the airlines who treat passengers more kindly; my single goal is to get the lowest fare for the shortest flight time (i.e. I will pay more for a nonstop flight). From what I have seen, even the people who vocally complain about airline mistreatment generally have the same cheap attitude that I do. As with so many other things, in airline travel you get what you pay for. As the SF Chron put it a few years ago when Southwest was the airline in controversy:
WRT the United policy, I think it’s a bad one even by its own “screw human beings, we need to make money” standards. Why not institute a policy in which arm rests have to stay down (just like seat backs have to be upright) until the plane reaches its resting altitude? If someone can fit into a seat within the bars of the arm rests, he can’t be infringing that much into anyone else’s space, just as a person who can get his feet under the seat in front of him can’t be. If someone is tall enough that his legs cannot fit into the coach space, he ought to buy a seat or fly an airline with more legroom.
like PG said: Are seats smaller? Yeah. Which is why you can fly round trip across the country for $99 each way. You can have big seats, you can have cheap seats, but you can’t have big, cheap, seats.
That won’t really do it–when I am flying, I WANT my armrest down, and I would not be happy if it had to go up 15 minutes into the flight. (I have flown a lot in my life. I can’t really think of a flight where the armrest wasn’t down, unless my neighbor was a family member.) Armrests help define your own personal space, in a society where that is becoming difficult to do.
The interesting thing are the claims of entitlement from both sides. The authors of that blog feel entitled to say of their potential seatmates,
IOW, they feel entitled to tell me that I either have to put up with being uncomfortable, or I have to pay for the privilege.
Which seems odd, at least to me. OK, it’s more than odd, it’s annoying as shit.
A seat is a certain width. Whether they are 17 inches or 19 inches, they are a certain width which, these days, is readily ascertainable by pretty much anyone with an Internet connection.
So if you know you won’t fit in a seat and you decide to fly on that airline anyway, you’re pretty much saying “well, fuck that dude next to me, because like it or not I’m using some of his space. He will just have to deal with it.”
Sure, society is not sugar coated and we all have interactions which are less than perfect. But just like meowser is entitled to say “I’m taking your space, like it or not,” I am entitled to say “get the fuck out of my personal space, dude. And leave that armrest where it is.”
I mean, really. I bought a box of space, I paid for that box of space, I use only that box of space.
Meowser buys a box of space, pays for a box of space, and… takes some of mine.
Yet, if I get annoyed about that, I am an “anti-fat troll” who should “suck it up and pay more.” WTF?
SM, I think there’s a huge difference between responding angrily to someone who is angry at me because I’m fat, and someone who is angry at me because I am fat.
I think meowser sometimes conflates an “anti-fat” and discriminatory attitude of aesthetic disgust (“you don’t want to be stuck next to my saddlebags”) with the fairly reasonable demand that one have a certain amount of personal space. In her post, she mocks a hypothetical person for not wanting to have his leg pressed up against her hips and thighs, but for most of us, regardless of whether the stranger your flesh is pressed against is fat or thin, that’s really gross. Especially in summer, when skin is bare and sweaty, I don’t care if you’re Leonardo DiCaprio* — I don’t want to touch. Even having a clothed body part constantly in contact with a stranger’s body is discomforting to many relatively wealthy people (I mean wealthy in a global sense; you cannot make such demands if you live in a slum).
A demand for privacy is kind of a Western wealthy privileged thing, but it’s not inherently anti-fat.
* The thinnest conventionally-attractive celebrity man who came to mind. I was puzzled by “Titanic” because when Kate Winslet allowed herself to have breasts and hips, she could have survived the cold water more easily than DiCaprio’s skinny butt.
But it’s not about you. I don’t care if my seatmate is fat, I care if they’re in my space.
If someone is pushing into my space I don’t like it. I don’t care if they’re skinny and invasive, or fat and invasive. Or white, or male, or black, or female, or short, or tall. I don’t like being bumped and squished either way.
Similarly, I have sat next to plenty of largish people who have been very good at staying out of my space, in which case I could care less what their body type is like.
That is a perfectly reasonable way to feel, I think. It is entirely personal. It is my own feeling.
meowser wants to make it about him/her. Now instead of having a universal “get out of my space, whoever you may be,” it gets framed as “get out of my space, fat person.” But that’s not what it really is, and I think you know that.
From my perspective, there is little difference between a thin elbower, a fat elbower, a crotch-airing lanky teen, and a suit-wearing corporate geek who tries to use my tray top to hold their second briefcase. They’re all in my space, and I don’t like them. And if I take your space, you can dislike me for that as well.
So when you say
I say: Sure! But my own rule tends to override that one:
I think there’s a huge difference between defending your personal space, and being angry at someone for trying to defend their personal space.
You, sir, may be using only the box of space you paid for. People with broad sholders encroach into my box of space, whether they want to or not, and yet the airlines will honor their reservations. People with pointy elbows and guys with giant phantom penises invade my box of space on purpose, and yet the airline will honor their reservations.
I’m not looking to get a box of space, though. I want to buy passage from Point A to Point B. The airlines (United is only the latest) have announced that they reserve the right to decide to refuse to honor my reservation at the last minute. Which means, in practice, the only way they’ll let me fly is standby – and they may ask me to pay double for the privilege.
If this were just about taking up space on the plane, you’d think they’d apply this policy to all persons who are wider than the seats at any point on their bodies, wouldn’t you? Not just the wide-hipped (who are disproportionately women) but also the wide-shouldered (who are disproportionately men). That would be fair, right? So why haven’t they announced that people with linebacker shoulders can only fly standby, and may be asked to pay double for the privilege?
I haven’t been able to come up with an answer that doesn’t boil down to misogyny and fat-hatred.
SM, how would you feel about someone who was brought down the aisle in a wheelchair, and whose body was shaped in such a way so that their leg was pressed against yours the entire way? Would you be angry at that person for infringing on your box of space?
If someone is infringing on your space because they refuse to sit in a reasonable fashion — sticking their elbows way out even though they’re capable of sitting with their elbows against their sides, for example — that’s one thing. If someone’s in your “box” because that’s just how their body is shaped, that’s a very different thing. I think anger at the former person is reasonable; anger at the latter person is not. Regardless of if the latter person is fat, broad-shouldered, disabled, etc..
Really good post, iiii. (I normally hate cheerleading posts, but as the original blogger here I feel empowered to be a little hypocritical now and then. :-P )
Perhaps that is because you are spending too much time arguing against “people with pointy elbows and guys with giant phantom penises” and claiming misogynistic fat hatred as a result, and not enough time listening to people saying “stop squishing me, whoever you are.”
My experience actually has been that broad shouldered men are less of a problem. When they become a problem, people will undoubtedly complain more about it.
But really: I just don’t like people in my space. Now I’m not only a fat-hater, but I’m a misogynistic fat-hater?
Amp,
I think if someone knows that his body will not fit into an airline coach seat, he should pay for a larger seat or for two seats. A lot of this has to do with notice; I agree with iiii that it’s wrong for the airlines to reserve the right to decide to refuse to honor a reservation at the last minute in a way that singles out a particular group of people (in point of fact, if you’ve ever been bumped off an over-booked flight, you should be aware that an airline always, for all people, reserves the right not to honor your reservation for that particular flight).
But if I know this about myself — if I know my legs are too long, or my hips too wide, or whatever my body conformation is that makes it impossible to contain me in the space that $200 R/T will buy — then it is my obligation to buy more space until I have enough to contain me. The people around me don’t owe me some of their space.
With the person in a wheelchair having a leg pressed against mine, not know if this is a permanent injury, or a temporary one in recovery, or what, I’d be really self-conscious about jarring the leg, whereas if I accidentally kick against a typical leg, a “sorry” suffices to cover any harm done. If someone’s in my box because they don’t care enough about others to buy themselves the amount of accommodation they need, that’s not all that different from the person who gets in my box because they don’t care enough about others to stay out of their boxes.
Meowser praises Canada for imposing the cost on the airline — instead of paying for two seats, passengers who do not fit in a single seat can inform the airline and will have two seats held for them on a flight while paying the cost of one. That might work for Canadian airlines (have their airlines not been regularly rotating through bankruptcy in the last decade? or do they just have higher airfares?), but it would require a significant shift in how American airlines operate. There is no way they could do this without raising the cost of fares for everyone. And OK, that may be the trade-off our society has to make to accommodate everyone’s different body types, just as we’ve absorbed the costs of having businesses accommodate various legally-recognized disabilities. I just dislike having Canada advanced as “see, it’s so easy if you just didn’t hate fat people” without acknowledging the costs.
Now, okay, if some fat person, or merely average sized person, is sitting next to me and making no effort to keep from touching me, that’ll piss me off. But most of the time people who cross the armrest boundary into my space are making a serious, if ultimately futile, effort to keep out of my space. It isn’t their fault that coach seats are absurdly narrow.
Pretty much every adult will not fit into an airline coach seat. I’m a very small person and I barely fit in a coach seat. Average sized adults infringe on my space in coach. Air travel is beginning to remind me of some traveling I’ve done in 3rd world countries in terms of personal space permitted.
It’s not their fault the seats are absurdly narrow; it is their fault for going into your space if they know the seats are narrow and not accommodating of their body and yet insist on buying coach seats anyway. Being cheap, I haven’t flown 1st or business class enough to say, but the folks I know who have gotten out of coach a lot never seem to have the problem of losing their personal space.
“Pretty much every adult will not fit into an airline coach seat.”
I don’t think that’s true. I’m genetically oriented toward an hourglassy figure, and since I started working full time and working out very little, I carry even more fat in bust, hips, thighs, and yes, saddlebags. Maybe my sample is skewed by being in NYC, but most of the women I see don’t have even as much “spread” as I do when seated. Yet the last time I flew, I could fit in an airline coach seat.
But coach seats may continue to narrow (or people like me continue to widen) to the point that your assertion is factually correct; once we reach that point, either there won’t be enough tiny people flying the cheap airlines to keep them going, or we’ll establish a new social norm in the West in which one doesn’t have an expectation of personal space. But for now, that is the expectation, it is what people think they are buying when they buy seats, and it is what airlines claim to be selling them.
OK, to those of you who are in favor of this policy: Do you think people who have medical equipment with them should be charged extra? Do you think a hardbody gym rat with huge hypertrophic biceps whose shoulders touch yours should pay extra? (ooh, sweaty flesh! we just LUVVVS being pressed up against you and fly as nekkid as possible! NAWWT.) Because if the answer is “no,” then your “paying for space” theory is a lie, and you think I should be punished for my saddlebags.
It’s also (as Kate Harding put it) a SEXIST rule. Almost everyone who will be affected by this policy is female. It’s female hips and thighs that are most likely not to “fit,” not some fat dude’s stomach, and we don’t have to be much over “average” to start not fitting. Most fat men would have to have a BMI of at least 45, maybe even 50, to not fit in one seat, and men with BMIs 45+ are pretty rare and 50+ rarer still. Can’t have uppity working-class women (especially NON-WASP working-class women, shudder!) on those planes, they should be happy to clean the bathroom at the airport for tips and overhear about everyone else’s great vacations and trips to see family.
Look folks, it’s not that complicated. One person/one fare does NOT mean someone gets to sit on you for five hours, it means they take care of that shit ahead of time without making people pay double just for inheriting the wrong DNA strands. In Canada, they ask you ahead of time if you have a physical condition that will cause you to take up any part of an adjoining seat, and if so, they COMP you the seat provided you show them official documentation (like a doctor’s note) of said condition, which can include body width.
It costs less than 80 cents surcharge per ticket for them to do this. It’s not that hard, and non-Canadian airlines are playing people like a fiddle for getting them to blame all their discomfort on the fatties. If they keep making the seats smaller — and why shouldn’t they for as long as they can get away with it? — one day you will be next. Yes. You. You, one day, will have to put your name on a list to wait, possibly for DAYS, before they get an opening with two adjoining seats that’s going where you’re going, and have to make work excuses and book extra hotel rooms on each leg of your trip. And then maybe you’ll start to think fat people might be actual people after all, since now you’re one of us.
I’m looking at the provisions for passengers with special needs on Sun Country Airlines. Maximum door width on Sun Country’s 737 aircraft is 34 inches, which may not accommodate all mobility devices … service animals must stay at passenger’s feet (i.e. you can’t demand a seat for your seeing eye dog) … walkers and canes must be stored in the overhead or in closet …
American Airlines implicitly expects passengers with mobility issues to figure out where the movable aisle armrests and accessible lavatories are on its various planes. AA says if a service animal is too large to fit under the seat or at the passenger’s feet without encroaching on another passenger’s space, it will need to travel in a kennel (provided by the passenger) in the cargo hold. Carry-On Assistive Devices, such as canes, walkers, CPAP machines and other assistive devices, must be capable of being collapsed small enough to fit into approved overhead and under seat stowage areas. They must be small enough to be stowed in such a manner as not to protrude into any seating row floor space or main aisle.
As best as I can tell, if your medical needs require extra space in the seating area to be accommodated, you don’t just get a free seat or free legroom. And the airlines clearly expect people with disabilities to plan ahead and be ready. The government regulations have a whole lot of if this service is available on the flight built in, and many apply only to airplanes with 60+ seats. The federal regs require that “For a person with a fused or immobilized leg, the carrier shall provide a bulkhead seat or other seat that provides greater legroom than other seats, on the side of an aisle that better accommodates the individual’s disability.” But that doesn’t require the airline to give two seats to one person, only to give preference in seat assignments to a person with this particular need. “If an individual with a disability does not make a request at least 24 hours before the scheduled departure of the flight, the carrier shall meet the individual’s request to the extent practicable, but is not required to reassign a seat assigned to another passenger in order to do so.”
I think it would be fine to include people whose width or length or whatever doesn’t fit into the standard coach seat among mobility-impaired as the group that gets priority for the exit row or bulkhead or otherwise more spacious seats. I only paid for a ticket; I didn’t pay to get a particular seat.
So yeah, it looks like the existing law doesn’t require airlines to provide two seats for the price of one to passengers with disabilities. § 382.38(i) states, “Carriers are not required to furnish more than one seat per ticket or to provide a seat in a class of service other than the one the passenger has purchased.”
If someone’s service animal doesn’t fit at her own feet and she needs to keep it in the passenger space rather than in the cargo hold (e.g. it is an emotional support animal who will help her withstand the stresses of the flight), she should pay for two seats. I don’t think that’s inhumane.
Why would you have to wait for days to get two adjoining seats? You said in your OP that you haven’t flown without your partner for years and have been able to avoid problems because you always sit together. How is it that you can always get two seats together for the two of you, but it would be impossible to get two seats together for yourself?
And you and several other people have claimed that half the population already can’t fit into these seats; Jake says it’s “Pretty much every adult.” I’m guessing your 80 cent surcharge on every other passenger’s ticket is if there’s only one person who requires two coach seats, but if the folks who can’t fit are as numerous as has been claimed — say, half the passengers — then that means where you previously had, say, 150 coach seats that you could sell at $100 per flight, you now have to reserve two-thirds of the seats for people who will not fit into a single seat, which means you sell 100 seats to 50 people who need two, and 50 seats to people who need one. Instead of charging $100 per ticket to make $15k, you now have to charge $150 per ticket to make the same amount of money.
Why would you have to wait for days to get two adjoining seats? You said in your OP that you haven’t flown without your partner for years and have been able to avoid problems because you always sit together. How is it that you can always get two seats together for the two of you, but it would be impossible to get two seats together for yourself?
You’re not serious, are you?
Oh, wait, you are.
So I suppose I have to explain it to you that when I (or we) fly, I (or we) have booked our reservations months in advance. I have never, ever, ever in my life just walked up to the gate and bought a seat, let alone two adjoining seats. Even when I flew on business, I never had a lead time of less than three weeks, and that was eight years ago; I’d probably need a lot more now.
Airlines are cutting flights all the time and overbooking each flight. Figure that under this policy there will probably be multiple fatasses booted off each plane and waiting for the next available two-seater, since women whose hips are bigger than 40 inches are not exactly a stone rarity, and also figure that many airports only have one flight a day going to a particular destination and sometimes not even that many, and many trips take multiple plane changes, and…yeah. It IS that bad. A lot of people, especially female people, stand to lose their jobs over this, or not be hired in the first place.
As for the airlines’ policies on PWD, that goes against what Sue (see my blog post) was told by United, which was that if she had a wheelchair she would not be charged for a second seat. And sure, most PWD would make that arrangement ahead of time…and also not be charged extra for it. Why not the rest of us? Also, there’s no real reason why someone SHOULD be kicked off a plane simply for having saddlebags, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be subject at random for it happening to us. All a thin person has to do is go “EWWW, IT’S TOUCHING ME,” and off we go, even if “it” isn’t in fact, actually touching them. Thin people’s comfort and convenience is important to them; fat people evidently don’t have enough money to be worth caring about.
And the cruel paradox of this is, the whole reason I was planning on making this trip (which I now might not do) is to check out a city I was planning on moving to specifically so I wouldn’t have to keep getting on a plane to visit my family. I may have to simply trust my partner’s judgment and move there sight unseen. He hasn’t been wrong about things like this yet, so I might not regret skipping the trip, but odds are that when I do move there I may have to plop my fat ass in a plane seat one last time, since it’s 3000 miles away.
Meowser, doing what you can to stay off of planes is the best answer all around, regardless of weight.
Airlines are bastards, they discriminate any way they can manage and then they beg for public money because they are “necessary public infrastructure.” Screw them, stick with *actual* public infrastructure like roads and Amtrak, or companies that compete for customer satisfaction, like some of the bus companies on the East coast (even here in flyover land, there is Megabus, which sucks but is CHEAP).
I stopped flying for political & environmental reasons back when I was a size 10 and my ass was *exactly* the width of a trans-Atlantic coach seat. I have occasionally regretted it for fleeting moments, but other than one instance of weakness (oh, the lures of a Carolina beach during a Minnesota winter) I don’t have any lasting regrets. The righteous satisfaction of *never* giving them any of my discretionary dollars is well worth it – especially in weeks like these, when we learn that the Global Climate Coalition was deliberately spewing lies and the Air Transport Association is one of their funders.
PG, the issue isn’t whether or not one can fit into the seat, in the sense of physical ability to do so. The question is if you can do so without touching the person seated next to you.
And I think you’re rushing to dismiss discrimination against fat people. I’ve certainly sat next to very broad-shouldered but not fat men and had them constantly touch me for the entire flight. They can’t help it; their shoulders are wider than an airline seat.
Similarly, what we’re mostly talking about here is wide-bottomed people who can fit in a seat, but not without touching the person next to them.
I think there’s a very good chance that the latter person, with wide hips, might be asked by United to get off, pay for two seats, etc. These are the people being targeted by this new rule. In contrast, there is zero chance that the broad-shouldered man is going to be asked the same thing. Even though in both cases, it comes down to the ability to sit in a very narrow seat, without part of your body pressing against the passenger seated next to you.
Thanks, Amp!
Sailorman, the whole thing is sexist. It’s claimed that the problem is passengers encroaching on each others’ space, but only certain encroachments are framed as problematic. Somebody else’s icky squishy fat hips in your space? Problem! Somebody else’s bony broad shoulders in your space? Totally not a problem.
Funny how the passengers with hips too wide for airplane seats happen to be mostly women, and the ones with shoulders too broad for airplane seats happen to be mostly men.
Then, there’s the solution to the wide-hips “problem”: make the fat chicks get off the plane and take a later flight. Which makes perfect sense if you believe women’s time has no value. Who cares if she’s inconvenienced? It’s not like women travel for business, or have any other good reason to get someplace at a particular time. And if she loses out on that promotion because she can’t get to client meetings on time, well, so what? She’s just a fat chick. Not like the broad-shouldered man in the next seat – he has work to do! Places to go, people to see! Can’t bump him.
This policy is designed to penalize women who take up “extra” space, while men who take up similarly “extra” space go about their business unmolested. As such, it’s misogynist.
If I knew for sure that I would be too wide for a seat in coach, I’d make arrangements accordingly. But I don’t know for sure. So far, I haven’t needed a seatbelt extender, and I’ve always been able to fit in the seat with the armrests down. Tightly, but I do fit. So far. I’m getting older and broader in the beam, and the airlines keep shrinking the seats. The only way to know for sure whether I’ll fit in a particular airline seat is to try the experiment, on the plane, after giving the airline my non-refundable money.
PG,
The weird difference between who would be affected by a rule allowing people with medical reason to request an additional seat and who would be affected by a rule allowing other passengers and flight attendants to decide that another passenger has to pay extra for an extra seat or get off the plane is comes from who makes the decision in those two cases, and what their incentives are to use the policy.
If there were a general policy that people with a medical need can request a double seat if they give advance notice, it would be used rarely, and overwhelmingly by people who are too large to fit at all into one seat. It would provide a major benefit for that small group of people, a tiny benefit to the rest of the population (really, a large benefit for a tiny random sample of the entire population), and a tiny fee for all of us.
If United has a policy that people who can’t fit in their seat must pay for an extra seat or leave the plane, then that policy will be used judgmentally against fat people (instead of broad shouldered men), particularly fat women and fat poor people and fat people of color (since any discretionary application of discrimination will be imposed disproportionately on people who are likely to be discriminated against anyway). The group of people who inconvenience their neighbors by slightly invading their space on planes is quite large, and any of them can be significantly harmed by such a policy depending on the whim of the person sitting next to them. Meanwhile, in almost all cases, the person who benefits by getting two seats for free is only marginally benefited (what happens when the person next to you is kicked off the plane or moved elsewhere to an empty pair of seats? In many cases you get an empty seat next to you. Only in the case where there are only a few seats and people have to be rearranged to create to contiguous seats will you end up with a new row mate. That alone creates a powerful incentive to complain). Sure, it is more pleasant not having to touch a stranger for hours on a cramped plane, and it is even more pleasant to have the seat next to you empty, but those aren’t benefits worth hundreds of dollars (or you’d be getting them already by flying first class or buying an extra ticket). Meanwhile, the airline gets a substantial benefit from forcing people to buy extra seats on partially filled flights.
The people you find objectionable to have sitting next to you are a much larger class than the people who can’t sit next to you. The Canadian policy resolves your conflict with anyone in the second category, while the United policy threatens everyone in the first category.
Another thing about this is that, as Sailorman points out, we already have a system in which a collective preference for cheap tickets has pushed the state of flying to one in which tiny seats dominate and are the default. This already benefits the not-fat majority and (even more so) the thin minority, who are able to sit in tolerable conditions and get cheaper tickets. Meanwhile, fatter people are forced to choose between sitting in uncomfortable to intolerable conditions or choose to pay much more for tickets. The United policy takes a situation in which thin and not-fat people have already unbalanced the situation in their favor, blames fat people for everyone’s discomfort, and proposes to charge fat people for an inconvenience to not-fat people that not-fat people are responsible for creating.
I can’t imagine how that seems fair.
I feel like I’m in this bizarre twilight zone, where I say “I don’t like elbows, shoulders, noses, phantom penises, or legs in my space; I don’t like anything in my space” and you get to say “lalalala, I’m just going to pretend you said something else, about icky hips.” Will you please, please, stop it already? It’s fucking dishonest, and annoying as hell.
The reason people fuss less about shoulders isn’t a man thing, it’s that you can usually deal with it on an airplane. If someone is bumping me with his or her shoulders, and I complain about it, then one of us just moves our seat back a tad, and–voila!–no bumping. Or they cross their arms. Or sit forward, or twist, or… Your torso is moveable and relatively unconfined, so having something against a single surface is easy to fix and therefore is not perceived as nearly as unpleasant. Your hips and butt are immovable and totally confined, so having something pushed against them is hard to fix and therefore perceived as much more unpleasant.
Yes.
Will you get off your high horse?
I don’t care if you’re fat. I have never used the word “saddlebags” in my life. I just want my space, and if you insist on feeling entitled to invade my personal space, then I think you’re being pretty damn obnoxious about it.
If I need more space than is available–either because I have a physical issue, or because I’m too tall, or too broad shouldered, or claustrophobic, or just plain wiggly–then it is incumbent on me to get that space. I can fly JetBlue, I can show up early on Southwest and go for the bulkhead seats; I can religiously read seatguru.
But what I can’t do is to show up on the plane, assuming that if I need more space, i will just steal it from my neighbor.
And what I can’t do is to tell my imposed-upon neighbor that if s/he doesn’t like my imposition, s’he should just fly first class.
Well, I could do that, I suppose, but I’d be acting like an asshole.
Look, you’re uncomfortable on planes? You want more room? So am I, so do I, and so does pretty much everyone I know other than a few, tiny, ambien-popping, sleep-before-takeoff, don’t-care-what-happens, types.
I spend half my flight trying to be sure that I stay inside my little box, because I am considerate for my seatmates. And when/if I get to the point where I can’t fit there, well, I’ll sit somewhere that I can fit. Your “saddlebags,” whatever those are, are not the only thing on the plane that needs attention. Your discomfort is not any more important than my discomfort; your wishes are not any more important than my wishes.
I want two seats, too. I would be 100% more comfortable and I wouldn’t limp for hours after getting off of the plane. My pregnant wife wanted two seats; my 6’10” friend wants two seats; my DVT-fearing uncle wants two seats so he can wiggle his legs constantly. My kids sure as hell want two seats each.
Do you want special treatment? So do we. Tell me why being fat pushes YOU to the head of the line; tell me why being fat makes ME have to pay for YOU to have two seats, but not the reverse.
SM, can you please stop taking this so personally? Will you please, please, stop it already?
In the comment by iiii you quoted, iiii wasn’t talking about you. She was using the generic “you,” not the Sailorman “you.” Using “you” this way is extremely common in the English language, especially in arguments.
By constantly responding to every argument by making it all about you, including the ones that aren’t about you, you’re being — how shall I put this — “fucking dishonest, and annoying as hell.”
Being a lawyer, I’m sure that at some point in your life you’ve encountered the argument that a facially neutral policy can still be said to be sexist if its burden is likely to fall disproportionately upon woman. Iiii is arguing that United’s anti-fat policy is such a case, because statistically women are more likely to be pear-shaped and men apple-shaped, and this rule will disproportionately impact the pear-shaped people.
It seems to me that iiii is almost certainly correct about that. Maybe you don’t agree that facially neutral policies can still be sexist due to disparate impact, but you’re acting as if that’s a ridiculous position to hold, and I don’t think it is.
Iiii also speculates that people as a whole are finding this acceptable because our society values women’s time less than men’s time. Iiii may or may not be right about why people are finding this acceptable, but whether or not she’s right about that doesn’t depend on you, Sailorman, feeling that way or not.
Finally, I’ve certainly been on flights where the shoulders of the person next to me were not avoidable by any means other than leaning forward so that my back was no longer against the seatback — not a comfortable or practical position for a five hour flight to the east coast. So if your claim is that it never, ever happens that a broad-shouldered person touches the person next to him, or if it ever does happen it’s easily and conveniently avoided, then I have to say that hasn’t been my experience.
Amp said, “PG, the issue isn’t whether or not one can fit into the seat, in the sense of physical ability to do so. The question is if you can do so without touching the person seated next to you.”
Are you sure that “whether you touch the person next to you” is the rule? The United website says, “Q: If I am seated next to a friend or family member, and neither of us minds leaving the armrest up, do I still need to purchase a second seat? A: You must be able to remain seated with the armrest(s) down for the entire flight. While you are permitted to lift up the armrest during the flight, it must be shown that the armrest can remain down if necessary.”
This sounds like they’re measuring by whether you can fit into the seat with the armrests down. Such a rule would impact men more than women because men tend toward belly fat that would make sitting with armrests down more difficult. My mentor, before he was diagnosed with diabetes but after he quit smoking, couldn’t fit comfortably into an airline seat with the armrests down and would make us (kids he was shepherding for a trip) have seats next to his and lift the armrests.
However, for the sake of discussion, in the remainder of my comment I will go with the “must not have a butt wider than the seat” assumption that seems to be prevailing in this discussion.
Oh, your point was that you might not be able to get two seats together if you don’t request them until the day of your flight. Well, yes, of course. That would be why it’s important for the airline to provide notice, something I’ve already stated @ 10. And why I’ve said over and over (see, e.g., @10) that just like PWD take responsibility for figuring out what planes will be able to accommodate their needs, people who don’t fit entirely within their seat need to do the same. You wouldn’t be able to be certain of getting two seats together if you ask for it on the day of the flight from the Canadian airline either; you’d have to give them enough advance notice that they don’t book every seat on the plane but instead keep an extra one for you. I am still confused as to why advance notice to the Canadian airline isn’t oppressively difficult, but buying two tickets in advance on an American airline is. Obviously one is more expensive, but you’re founding your argument on difficulty and I don’t see how there is a difference in that respect.
iiii says, “If I knew for sure that I would be too wide for a seat in coach, I’d make arrangements accordingly. But I don’t know for sure.”
But just like PWD, you can look at the type of plane you are contemplating taking (Boeing 727? something smaller?) and at its seat configuration to figure out whether it meets your needs. Meowser linked in her OP a website that tells you what the seat width on various plane configurations are. The rest of us can start doing what PWD have had to do for years — plan ahead, instead of just assuming that everything in the world is designed to accommodate us. PWD are guaranteed that something will be able to accommodate them, but they can’t assume without checking that any given flight will. Why are those of us without legally-recognized disabilities entitled not to have to plan ahead?
Also, iiii, United specifically says, “Q: What if there are no flights available with extra seating on the day of my scheduled departure? A: If there are no flights available on the date of your ticketed flight, then you may be rebooked on a flight the following day. As an alternative, you can have the ticket refunded with no penalty even if you had purchased a nonrefundable ticket.”
I figured out yesterday that my hips/thighs at their widest point, when seated and all the fat’s pressed against the surface on which I’m sitting, take up almost 17″. So far, I still can fit in the narrowest coach seats, but if I continue to gain fat in these areas as I’ve been doing in the last year, I might not by the time I’m booking a flight to see family at Christmas. Something to keep in mind when doing that booking — either don’t take United, or pay for a larger seat. Because there are multiple airlines with different policies, as well as larger seat options, I don’t have to buy two seats, and if people with expansive hips and butts (and the folks traveling with them) all avoid United because it’s too expensive, it will get killed in the hyper-competitive airline market.
I don’t know why people are still claiming that airlines have to give two seats to PWD if there’s an advance request. They don’t. And I find it implausible that, in the absence of a law requiring the airlines to provide this accommodation, they would consistently do so. But let’s look at United’s stated, written, publicly-available policy, which would be enforceable at the gate, whereas “what this one United rep on the phone, I didn’t catch her name, told my friend Sue this one time” isn’t. (I’m not clear on why a person in a wheelchair needs two seats anyway.)
In their lengthy Q&A section, under “Passengers requiring extra space”:
Q: Does this policy violate the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Air Carrier Access Act? A: No. Airlines are not required by applicable laws to provide additional seating or an upgrade free of charge to a passenger who requires additional space.
The policy on wheelchairs offers lots of assistance getting from one place to another, and storage for your wheelchair, and the use of United’s wheelchairs. Doesn’t offer an extra seat.
Sue may have been dealing with a customer service rep who quite frankly didn’t know what she was talking about. This is why I don’t depend on “but the person on the phone said” when I am telling a corporation that they have to give me something; I carry a printout of their written policy.
If they’re not consistently providing two seats for people with legally-recognized disabilities, why should they be doing it for people whose bodies otherwise don’t conform to the contemporary coach seat configuration? I just don’t get this assumption that all of us who are not deemed PWD therefore should be able to go through life not dealing with any extra trouble or expense.
When my aunt still could travel (she passed away last year at the age of 48, after spending half her life going in and out of cancer remission, during which she had her hips replaced and colon removed), my grandmother went with her to assist. They booked two seats; when they couldn’t afford two seats, they didn’t fly. Why am I entitled to two seats for the price of one for my needs, but my aunt wasn’t?
Oh, bullshit.
Amp, if I respond to you by name, and then in the same paragraph or line of reasoning I use the word “you,” then I mean YOU. Not, “people,” “the public,” “some folks,” but you. That’s how the language generally works. If you* can’t admit that, you’re being deliberately difficult.
If you–YOU PERSONALLY, if that isn’t crystal clear–are OK with people responding to individuals, using their names, slinging terms like “fat hating” and “misogynist,” and then suddenly claiming “oh, I didn’t mean YOU, I meant all those OTHER fat hating misogynists who exist in the world, but who aren’t in this thread….” Well, i have to say I’m disappointed in you. I’m not disappointed in the public, I’m disappointed in you.
* Like here. Would you seriously consider the use of the word “you” in this context to refer to a global “you” as opposed to you, Amp, specifically? That is what you seem to be saying, after all.
PG writes:
But the airlines will never, ever institute such punitive policies against tall people, or wide-shouldered people, and you know it. This policy will only be used against fat people.
You don’t think it’s possible they can’t afford to pay double for their air travel?
A couple of flights ago, I was next to a man who was very fat — significantly fatter than I am. I can fit — sometimes just barely — in a typical airline seat without lifting the armrests, but this man could not, and as luck would have it these seats were as narrow as airline seats get. As a result, he and I were uncomfortably pressed together for the entire flight, not just as the hip level but also in our upper bodies.
That was inconvenient for both of us. But I didn’t assume that the reason he didn’t buy two seats was that he didn’t care about anyone but himself, as you suggest here — after all, he was as uncomfortable as I was (probably more uncomfortable, mentally — he clearly felt bad about the situation, and apologized to me several times for his size, although I told him that no apology was needed).
That’s life. Sometimes someone’s else’s situation in a public space means that the rest of us are going to be less comfortable. Sometimes people can’t afford to pay double. Sometimes it’s not reasonable to just give up on ever taking airplanes, ever. The harms to him, of having to pay double or forgo flying altogether, would be larger than the harms to me of being uncomfortable on that flight.
Maybe paying double is no big deal to you. But it would be a big deal to a lot of people.
And for the non semantic portion:
Sure, facially neutral policies can have discriminatory effects, though I am not sure that the proper tag would be “sexist.” But atht’s semantics again.
So, sure: Women have bigger butts, proportionally speaking. They are also smaller, statistically speaking; so who knows whether it’s a wash.
You want to talk discriminatory effect? Now, we need numbers and statistics. What percentage of women can’t fit, as opposed to what percentage of men can’t fit? And while we’re at it, what percentage of women can’t fit in an airline seat (not just for width reasons) as opposed to what percentage of men can’t fit?
Is that percentage difference big enough to be an issue?
No, but the argument I am presenting (which i will sum up as the “space costs money” argument) is probably the most common position presented in opposition to the “fat hating misogynistic people are responsible for small seats” argument.
At some point you need to look at which makes more sense. So far, meowser and iii and you have basically replied by saying “well, I bet you wouldn’t say that about a disabled or large-bicepped person!” (and y’all have not been using that elusive global ‘you’, as far as I can tell.)
You want to talk facts? I’m talking facts. If you want to drop the claims of fat hating misogyny and discuss whether this is a facially neutral policy with discriminatory effect, I’m all ears.
Are you talking about my claim, or is this a global “you” again? Because if you want to know what I am claiming, it’s in my post. You don’t need to use the words “if you’re claiming…” when you can quote me.
SM, you seem to be conflating iiii and Meowser. Here’s the relevant portion of iiii’s comment #19, which you responded to in #22:
It seems to me that iiii is fairly careful to always cast blame and intentionality on “this policy” and “the whole thing,” not on the people here in this thread who disagree with her. Furthermore, her tone in the post as a whole is fairly dry and evenhanded, not flamey or attacking. In that context, it’s reasonable to read the two “you”s — which immediately followed referencing “the whole thing” — as generic, rather than Sailorman-centric. Sorry you can’t see that.
They already do for tall people, practically speaking.
Tall people can’t fly on low pitch airlines. They already know it and tend to self select. If someone insist on insisting on sticking her feet on top of her neighbor’s feet, then the neighbor can complain and they’ll probably be booted off the aircraft.
The policy against broad shouldered people will be an issue when people start complaining about it, I imagine.
I’m sure it is a big deal. But airline travel isn’t a right. Lots of people do without it; I had a friend in high school who never got on a plane until she was halfway through college. If prices for coach seats go back to where they were in the 1970s (adjusting for inflation*), will you say the airlines are discriminating against low-income people by having such high fares? We have the low fares of today because airline travel now sucks. It’s not fun and luxurious anymore; it’s cramped and awful, and that makes it affordable for most Americans.
I haven’t seen a counter-argument to the point I made that Meowser’s 80-cent surcharge works only if you don’t believe her other claims about how half the population already, and more in the future, will need two seats. Is there something that makes this work economically that I’m just not getting? Or is there an undeclared assumption that the cost of having large people travel should be spread among all passengers, regardless of what that cost may be, as part of having a decent civil society? If that’s the assumption, let’s have that discussion instead of pretending that this is cost-less.
* A standard one-way fare DC to NY in 1971 was $24 in 1971 dollars; inflation adjusted, that’s $107.14 in 2007 dollars (I don’t have a 2009 chart to hand). A standard one-way fare DC to NY today is $55 with taxes and fees included.
I meant comment #19 exactly the way Amp read it. I do agree that my intent would have been clearer had I not cast it in the second person.
Jeez, if United’s policies are such a source of stress, I hope Meowser never flies this airline.
PG, that is spot on. We get less because we pay less. Coach isn’t what it used to be.
In fact, by your calculations it is pretty much the same price to buy two seats these days than it would be to have bought a single seat back when. If so, that would mean that big people weren’t being charged more than the cost of an imaginary old-style fit-everyone seat, they just can’t buy the newer super-economy-class teenyseats, because they won’t fit.
And of course, like you said, air travel isn’t a right. (if it were a right, we’d have to also figure out a way to make it affordable for everyone to fly, including poor people, large families, etc.) I would fly all the time if I could, but it’s too expensive, so I don’t.
Airline travel may not be a right, but it may be a requirement of your job.
And, I fail to see what is so radical about the idea that if YOUR preference (the generic “you”) is to make absolutely sure that no one around you can touch you, that YOU (generically) should not bear the responsibility of seating yourself in the place where that is most assured: first class. Why shouldn’t YOU (generic) take responsibility for YOUR (generic) preference?
Can’t afford to exercise YOUR (generic) preference? Then welcome to the blatant class stratification that is airline travel. Those who can pay, get to be treated like humans. Those who can’t, are lucky they even still bother to heat cattle class rather than saying “bundle up!”
Elusis,
I think the underlying factual premise of your comment, that United’s policy applies to anyone who merely incidentally touches another passenger, is not correct. As I noted in my comment @ 25, the policy seems to be based on whether you can fit in a seat with the armrests down.
Currently, people buying airline tickets are being told that they’ve bought a seat — not part of a seat, not whatever bit of the seat isn’t encroached upon by the people next to them, but a seat. It’s like the difference between buying ticket for a seat at a concert and buying a ticket for the grassy hill; if I bought the cheap grassy hill ticket, I can’t complain if it’s hugely crowded and people keep stepping on my blanket. If I bought a ticket for a seat, I damn well will complain to security if someone spends the entire concert standing halfway into my seat’s space. I bought the more-expensive seat ticket and I will enjoy it.
If an airline declares that in order to really cut down on costs, it in fact isn’t selling me a seat to myself, but instead a seat I have to share with others, it’s not getting my business anymore. E.g., if an airline switched to bench style seating where they’d crowd as many people onto the bench as possible and have detachable seatbelts that could be added, but hey they’re selling seats for $30, that’s where my cheapness would stop. But maybe other people would say, “Great, $30 for a ticket, I don’t care if I’m pressed up against other people!” Just as we’ve said so far, “Great, $55 for a one way ticket DC to NYC, I don’t care if the seat is tiny and the service terrible and only one carry-on permitted.”
Similarly, people who don’t like the idea that they’re now constrained to using only their own seat space can take their business away from United and any other airline that has such constraints, and give all their business to airlines that treat seats as communal property. I’m not telling them they’re obligated to fly United. The only way the market can work at all is if people refuse to patronize bad businesses.
Elusis,
I also find odd your implicit assumption that you have a right to receive certain services from a private business regardless of how little you’ve paid that business. Do you walk into a salon with $40 and demand that you get the same experienced stylist they gave someone who paid $80? If not, why should Delta have to treat you the same way it treats passengers who paid $400 to fly on the same flight you got for $200? Again, in inflation-adjusted numbers, you can get a business-class seat today for the same price you would have paid for a coach seat in 1971. Were we all being horribly oppressed in 1971 to have to pay such prices?
Nobody’s ever bothered me when I stretched out across a row of seats. (I do that pretty often, although the option isn’t available as frequently as it used to be.) They don’t demand that I stay within the confines of my purchased and assigned seat. I can expand the seat area I take up w/ no repercussions as long as I’m not invading anybody else’s space. Based on my experience I’d say that Elusis’ interpretation is at least as accurate as your’s.
PS: It occurs to me that I often have radically different views than you do, PG. It amazes me that we’re able to combine those differences with the fact that I enjoy all of our interactions and often learn something new. So I guess I’ll just say, “Thanks,” before it’s too late.
I didn’t say every woman with 40″ or more hips would be kicked off the plane and forced to wait and pay double. I said they could be kicked off the plane and forced to wait and pay double. Because, you see, it’s down to gate agent’s discretion and passenger complaints; it’s not like they are going to actually measure people before they board or even after, once they have a complaint. I really, seriously doubt every one of the 700 complaining passengers was actually being squished by someone; in many cases, squicked is probably more like it. If the gate agent takes one look at you and say you’re too fat to board, that’s it, and you know what happens if you raise a stink with gate agents nowadays.
Anyway, I seriously doubt they have that many fewer people on average actually needing dual-seat accommodations in Canada than in the U.S. There are a LOT more flights departing the U.S., by orders of magnitude.
And no, United’s not the only one pulling these shenanigans. They all do it. But they’re the ones who made a point of making a big announcement about caring so deeply about the comfort of Thin People Only.
The least they could do is fly some planes with bigger seats. Like, I don’t know, the ones they had 15 years ago. Would I pay a little extra for that extra 2 inches? Sure. Just not double. And if they insist fatasses be splayed out across a double seat, they could at least figure out how to get the armrests all the way back.
There are two separate-but-linked arguments going on here: one is that airlines should not charge people extra if they need multiple seats, and the other is that people (of any shape) who invade their seatmates’ space should be able to do so with impunity so long as they aren’t doing so just to be obnoxious.
Obviously, there is nothing preventing someone from touching their neighbor, and airlines don’t prohibit that fact. If I’m at the border of my seat, and someone else is at the border of their seat, we’ll touch along the boundary. That happens all the time in airplane seats; it is pretty much impossible to share an armrest without touching. If one is morally opposed to any physical contact at all, one needs to deal with it on one’s own dime, including but not limited to both sucking it up and buying expensive/private seats.*
But someone doesn’t have to touch me to invade my space. I pay for seats, choose seats, and select flights with the expectation of getting what I paid for: my space. If I’m not at the border of my seat, and i want to go there, and I can’t, because your arm is sticking into my seat… the issue isn’t that you’re touching me, it’s that I don’t get what’s mine.
That is how things work on airlines. We don’t get as much space as we want (I want three seats, like everyone else.) We don’t get as much space as we need (whether tall, big-hipped, broad-shouldered, twitchy, claustrophobic, disabled, or anything else, few people are getting their needs met by an airplane seat.)
We get as much space as we pay for.
If the goal is to get as much room as we need or want, then what? Airline travel will immediately get too expensive for pretty much everyone, since the public’s needs and wants are not being met in the current configuration. Make seats wider to accommodate people? Sure! I would like another two inches of seat pitch, please, while we’re at it.
I guess I don’t see how my need for more seat pitch (long legs) would get ignored, if the mantra becomes “give people what fits their body type.” So we could go that route, too: I’ll pay the surcharge to make all seats 20 inches wide, when y’all pay the surcharge to make all seats 36 inches pitch. Of course, then we will be paying $400 instead of $200 to fly NYC-LAX round trip, at which point we will all think air travel is too expensive.
Sailorman and PG,
The majority which can still fit in airplane seats have pushed the airlines towards cheaper tickets and smaller seats. That your butts still fit in airline seats does not mean that you have a right to that space. You have participated in forcing the seats to be too small for some of your neighbors and, by doing so, you have given up your right to that space. If you fly coach, it is possible that you will sit next to someone who can’t fit neatly in the space you have decided is sufficient to fit your ass (you personally decided this when you decided not to fly first class, and you participated in choosing this over time by choosing cheap tickets over slightly larger seats). It is not the fault of the person you are sitting next to that they don’t fit in the seat. They didn’t choose how big the seat is, you (as part of the not-fat majority) did. I suspect that most fat people would prefer to pay marginally more to have seats that were marginally larger (fit 5 seats per row instead of 6, and many more people would fit, and ticket prices would need to increase by 1/6), but they aren’t enough of the market to control the standard coach seat size.
We not-fat people decided that seats should be too small to fit some significant portion of the population. This decision already harms fat people more than it harms either of you. Sometimes when you fly, you lose the lottery that we not-fat people have agreed to, and you have to sit next to someone who doesn’t fit in the seats we have agreed to, and your space is reduced below what you find acceptable. Nearly every time a fat person flies, they are forced to sit next to someone who reduces their space below what they find acceptable. Now you and United want to punish fat people further by declaring that they are not allowed to benefit from the low prices that the small seats have created, so that you can have small seats and cheap tickets, but not have to have your space “infringed on.”
Meowser,
If United passed a rule that said “all passengers need to stay within the boundaries of your seat”–a rule that would affect weightlifters, twitchers, and fat people alike–would you support it?
They did. they didn’t make enough money, however that gets measured. AA used to have larger seat pitch in 1999. From the NYT:
Now, that added probably a single row–a guess, but based on five seats, a reasonably accurate one.
But seat pitch isn’t really where the money is. Normal pitch is about 31-32 inches; you can give everyone an extra inch of knee room and you only lose one row out of 32 or so. Similarly, cutting pitch by an inch won’t gain you more than a single row in an airplane with less than 60 or so rows of seats.
But if an airline with a 5-across or 6-across seating setup can go to 6-across or 7-across, they add an extra seat per row. And since 5x and 6x airplanes tend to have huge economy classes, often 20 or more rows… well, that’s a HUGE profit difference, and it is the reason that seat width is going down.
Maybe the airlines should start charging an exclusive possession of the air space around a seat, because we pretty obviously aren’t paying for that currently. You may want to imagine that you are, but you obviously aren’t.
PG – your analogy is flawed. Cattle class *is the lawn seats*.
Charles S – exactly. The fact that the person in front of me can recline their seat into “my space” makes that a clear falsehood. And the fact that they are not assessing passengers for any space invasion potential – broad shoulders, long legs, big invisible… egos… – makes it clear that this is about the fact that FAT GROSSES PEOPLE OUT and makes them angry.
Jake Squid,
“I can expand the seat area I take up w/ no repercussions as long as I’m not invading anybody else’s space.”
Yes, that’s the point here: if the flight is full with no seats unoccupied, and you lift the arm rest to push your head onto the one inch left on my seat and have your head pressed up against my thigh for three hours, I’m going to be unhappy. The same is true if you lift the armrest so some part of you that doesn’t fit within the confines of your seat can rest on mine. As Amp’s anecdote illustrated, there are people who do not fit in a seat with the armrests down. Amp kindly accepted having the armrests up in order to accommodate his fellow passenger, but that’s kindness, not a moral much less legal obligation. If you tell me that you just came from your dad’s funeral and haven’t slept in two days and apologize for putting your head on part of my seat so you can sleep, I’ll probably accept that too, but I don’t owe it to you; it’s not your right or entitlement. If I’ve paid for a seat, it is mine to share or keep to myself.
“Based on my experience I’d say that Elusis’ interpretation is at least as accurate as your’s.”
Elusis’s interpretation of United’s policy is at least as accurate as mine? I don’t mean to be rude, but based on what? So far as I can tell, Elusis was not relying on any statement by United, only statements by Meowser (who is not the company spokeswoman). I’m doing my best to interpret their policy based on what they’ve said about it, and the only measure I’ve seen them provide is not whether you’re touching another person, or whether someone complains, but whether you can fit with the armrests down. If someone has seen something else that would back Elusis’s interpretation that it’s a touch-based policy, please share.
So I guess I’ll just say, “Thanks,” before it’s too late.
That sounds slightly foreboding :-) But thanks to you as well.
Meowser,
“I really, seriously doubt every one of the 700 complaining passengers was actually being squished by someone; in many cases, squicked is probably more like it.”
That was 700 complaints in all of 2008, right? In 2008, United carried 63,071,000 passengers. You “really, seriously doubt” that roughly 1 of every 100,000 passengers might have been sitting next to a person who couldn’t fit in the seat with the arm rests down? We’ve already had one person on this thread of 10 commenters describe sitting next to such a passenger, but it’s impossible that 1 of every 100k passengers — especially keeping in mind that if the person who doesn’t fit is in the middle seat, there’s someone on either side of him complaining — could have had such an experience?
“Would I pay a little extra for that extra 2 inches? Sure.”
Then I’d recommend buying tickets based not just on the cheapest flight, but on the aircraft used. According to the Detroit Free Press:
Jet Blue has 17.75 inches on every seat, every flight.
Also mentioned in the Detroit Free Press: “It may not seem like a lot, but if you are shopping for flights and think an extra half inch may make the difference between your fitting in the seat (armrest down, seatbelt with extender buckled) and having to buy a second seat, do your homework.”
It looks like they share my interpretation that the United understanding of “fit in your seat” is measured by “armrests down.”
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No. but they DID choose which seat to sit in and how (coach, first, one seat or two) and whether to sit in it at all, yes? And unlike me, they made that choice with full awareness of the situation, where I–a random ticket purchaser–did not. Why are you placing the obligations resulting from that interaction squarely on my shoulders? Because I fit in my seat?
They probably are, actually. Airline margins are small, competition is extremely fierce, and fat people are not all that rare. If pricier and roomier flights start making the airlines more money, they will create more of them.
I don’t think this happened. I think that fat people acted like everyone else; they are human and are just as cheap as the rest of us, and therefore just as complicit in the problem.
Well, i don’t fit well myself. And I often don’t fly because I don’t want to be in pain afterwards. But if you consider than a nonexistent or lesser harm, that’s your right.
but I don’t agree. And as it seems, MOST people don’t agree, which is how that policy got enacted in the first place.
Yes! Except without the “punishment” bit.
Not everyone has to be equally accommodated by every single thing in the world. We can offer first class seats that are only available to rich people (do you object to those?) We can offer private planes that are only available to ULTRA-rich people (do you object to those?) We can offer air travel in general that is only available to non-poor people (objections?) and to those who can get to airports, and to those who are traveling where airplanes go, and to those who can make their lives work around flight times and schedules, and who aren’t on some random list, and who have licenses or ID. And we can offer super cheap seats that are only available to those who can fit in them with comfort, thus barring the fat, super tall, claustrophobic, DVT sufferer, etc.
See, what we have actually done is to expand the available options. There are airlines with bigger seats (they cost more) and airlines with smaller seats (they cost less) and airlines with three or four different levels of seating on the same plane (each delineated by cost.)
When you say, in essence, “you should not be allowed to sell cheap seats which will not fit everyone” you are trying to impose your views on everyone else. How is that significantly different from “you shouldn’t be allowed to sell first class seats” or “you shouldn’t be allowed to sell half price kids’ seats?” Why on earth should you be allowed to make that restriction?
Based on the fact that on United flights I can spread out over 3 seats if my row is otherwise unoccupied with no repercussions. The rule, as enforced, is clearly that I may not touch other passengers and not that I must stay within the confines of the single seat that I purchased.
Charles S,
Could you rebut my claim that the average business-class ticket today costs no more in inflation-adjusted dollars than a coach ticket did in 1971? If you can’t rebut that claim, then why is it my fault that someone who would have had to pay $110 (in 2009 dollars) for a seat into which she could fit in 1971 now pays $110 (in 2009 dollars) for a seat in which she can fit (a business class seat)? My participation in the airline price wars has not made flying in an accommodating-size seat more expensive for a fat person; it has only require the fat person to pay more than I do, rather than both of us getting nice wide seats for the same price. I will pay for a narrow seat; she can pay for a wider seat. You would have an argument here if there were no option for a wider seat, but there is.
“Sometimes when you fly, you lose the lottery that we not-fat people have agreed to, and you have to sit next to someone who doesn’t fit in the seats we have agreed to, and your space is reduced below what you find acceptable.”
But that’s not a lottery non-fat people have agreed to. I agreed to buy a seat. I paid for a seat. I am entitled to all of that seat. Again, if there’s an airline where the contract of carriage actually says, “Having driven fares down, you get only 2/3 of your seat,” then I’d agree with you. There isn’t. The airlines claim to be selling me a seat. If I complain about infringement of my seat space and the airline says, “Yeah, see this fine print? We didn’t sell you a full seat,” I would never fly that airline again. So if that’s what the fine print actually says, please point it out to me.
Maybe the airlines should start charging an exclusive possession of the air space around a seat, because we pretty obviously aren’t paying for that currently. You may want to imagine that you are, but you obviously aren’t.
Why am I obviously not paying for that? The fact that the airlines will allow for space infringement doesn’t mean that the space infringement is what I’ve paid for. I paid two guys $300 to install my stove; they installed it crookedly and I didn’t notice before I gave them the check. However, if I had noticed it, they would have righted it and I would have been within my rights to refuse to pay until they did the job properly. Does that mean I “obviously am paying for crappy installation” or does that mean that people will do whatever they can get away with and will take your money for it unless you call them on it?
Elusis, my analogy was between coach seats for which I’ve paid and concert seats for which I’ve paid (both have assigned seating in which each individual is supposed to remain), and a hypothetical airline that had benches and the grassy hill at the concert.
“And the fact that they are not assessing passengers for any space invasion potential – broad shoulders, long legs, big invisible… egos… – makes it clear that this is about the fact that FAT GROSSES PEOPLE OUT and makes them angry.”
If any of those folks won’t fit into a seat with the armrests down, that would make sense. So far as I know, none of those things do impede the armrests being down.
“Based on the fact that on United flights I can spread out over 3 seats if my row is otherwise unoccupied with no repercussions. The rule, as enforced, is clearly that I may not touch other passengers and not that I must stay within the confines of the single seat that I purchased.”
No, the rule is that you must stay within that seat unless there are spare seats. United is not going to bother people who fortuitously are in the center seat in an otherwise empty row.
ETA: To clarify, suppose someone had a phobia about touching other people and therefore bought two seats together just for himself. He sat at the window, reserved the middle as well, and left the aisle seat open for you to buy. If you spread out into the middle seat he had purchased, and he points out to the stewardess that he has purchased two tickets to accommodate his phobia, you’re going to be ordered to get off his seat even if you haven’t touched him.
I don’t think that’s the rule, I think that’s an exception. United cares about seating when it is full. Just like theater ushers enforce seating when the theater is full, but not when it is empty.
Are you suggesting that United enforces the “no seat for fat people” rule even on flights where there are many empty seats available?
And/or are you suggesting that if there are empty seats available, that fat people get priority for those seats, for the same price as everyone else?
It’s an interesting question. Say you have a 6’10 guy, a pregnant woman, a dad with a heavy and overheated “lap baby,” a mild claustrophobic, a PWD with a cramped service dog, a grandfather with a broken leg in a straight cast, and a fat person.
Everyone wants an extra seat. Everyone is hoping to get lucky, be quick, or both. Nobody wants to pay for it.
In this hypothetical, for everyone except the fat person “buying a seat on the plane” and the cost involved means “getting an opportunity to grab the extra seat(s) if any, and stretch out.” But for the fat person it’s different: if they don’t get the free seat, they don’t get to fly at all, because they don’t fit. Should the fat person be able to claim the seat automatically, asserting a right over the collective group, without compensating them for the privilege? If not, the fat person gets hosed. If so, the rest of the members of the group plane lose out, but by far less on an individual basis.
PG – and, I think your analogy is flawed. I think the level of service and comfort you are getting in cattle class is more like the lawn than the seating at a concert.
But then, you said yourself you don’t fly much.
The focus on the armrest and intrusion in the hip/thigh area, rather than on any intrusion at all (those that can be made by shoulders, arms, and feet; and those that are made by people who can put the armrest down but have intrusive body language) further reinforces my point that it is the “grossness” of fat bodies, particularly fat female bodies, rather than the “my dollars, my space” issue at work here. Some kinds of intrusion are OK, and some kinds of intrusion are gross and must be stopped. (Particularly, it would seem, those kinds of intrusion that are allegedly the fault of the person whose body is intrusive, because of course if fatties would just take the time to helpfully get not-fat before flying, they would not gross out “normal” people.)
And lest we lose the excellent points made above by iii and others, I also believe that the “grossness” issue is at work here when people think about who might need to fly and do so on a time schedule. Businesspeople with an important meeting? Fat, gross people are never important or powerful (unless they’re white men who are so important and powerful that they can fly first class or charter a plane.) Researchers or academics making an important presentation? As Susan Doyle’s case demonstrates, we are all still stuck in the Victorian belief that appearance tells us something about intellect and talent, so clearly fat people could not have to get to a conference or invited talk. Someone with a sick or dying relative? That would imply that fat people love and are loved by others, which we all know isn’t true because they’re so gross. Someone making a connection to a flight or a cruise or other transportation for a well-deserved vacation? Fat people should be hitting the gym, not the beach.
If you want to be immune from being around people with intrusive bodies, cough up the cash for the privilege.
Elusis,
I disagree. There is nothing in American air travel that is comparable to the lawn because so far as I know, all air travel requires the customer to occupy a single seat. You can have the Southwest system where you can pick any seat, but you get the one seat. Also, I’ve never sat on the lawn at a concert and had someone come by even to sell me a drink; I always had to scramble down to the concession stands. There’s minimal supervision (which is why people are more likely to smoke up there). Lawn seating is a Hobbesian place.
I said @ 12, “I haven’t flown 1st or business class enough to say…” If you average it out, I take about one flight a month, and an international flight every year. I always fly coach because I’m cheap and so is my employer. In the last 12 months, I’ve flown to and back from Cancun, Detroit, Dallas, Houston, Houston, Tokyo, Houston and D.C. About half of those flights were with my husband.
Why are armrests particularly bad for fat female bodies? Our fat’s rarely in the body parts that hit the top of an arm rest. Men’s is.
Uh, any of these people who need to fly in a timely manner can do so if they either buy two tickets or buy a business/1st class seat. Your rhetoric implies that the airline will refuse to seat a fat person (where fat is defined as it appears United’s policy does it, “person who cannot fit into a seat with the armrests down”) until every other person who wants to buy a ticket for a flight has done so, and then only if there are two seats together remaining. This has no relationship to reality. Businessmen, buy a business class ticket! Ditto researchers, academics, and people with sick or dying relatives. (That actually was the occasion for one of my flights to Houston last year, when my sister called to tell me our aunt had gone into a coma. I got royally screwed on how much I paid because I got on a flight 2 hours after the call and had no idea when I’d be flying back — it ended up being about 10 days later, after my aunt had died and we’d had the memorial service and cremation. Shockingly, last minute booking and indeterminate returns are expensive.)
And if there’s an airline that says it’s going to run on that basis, that’s fine. I just won’t patronize that airline. I like having my own space, the airlines are telling me I’ve paid for that space, so the only person involved who disagrees is the person trying to take some of my space. If I go to an airline that says space is communal and I complain, then I’m the odd man out and am reasonably told “cough up the cash if you don’t want to share.”
PG,
The lottery of possibly sitting in a row where the three of you can’t fit comfortably has existed for decades, with the not-fat majority and the airlines gradually poaching space from the standard seat size. Unless you have been choosing to fly business class or refusing to fly, you have been choosing to participate in the lottery. If you have been picking flights purely by price instead of by seat width, then you have been choosing to drive the size of seats down, making the discomfort lottery more noticeable to you and making conditions worse for fat people. United has decided to change the rules in a way that even further disadvantages fat people, while retaining your advantage. that doesn’t seem fair to me.
Business class seats may cost what standard seats cost 30 years ago, but there is no reason that 5 seats instead of 6 should cost twice as much. Business class seats also have expanded leg room, nicer seats, and much more bathroom per person. If there existed a wide range of size options in seating, such that prices were incremented much more gradually between one price and twice that price, I would have somewhat less problem with the idea of expecting people to purchase seats that were appropriately sized. However, even in that case, if you want to be sure that you will not have to negotiate the boundaries of your space on an ad-hoc basis with your neighbors, then you should purchase a space noticeably larger than yourself. Getting to be your own private island is a special privilege, and not one that should be carved out at other people’s expense.
But only United’s new policy claims that you have a fixed allotment of space. United’s old policy and all other airlines merely grant you a seat. If the person sitting next to you takes up so much of your seat that you can’t sit there, then I suspect the airlines would always have intervened, but until United’s new policy, you have always flown on airlines where the space was somewhat communal. United is the one that is changing the rules of the game, not those of us who object to the change.
And the new rules will obviously benefit most people while severely harming some people, so unless there is a collective objection to the change, the magic of the marketplace will ensure that fat people are significantly harmed so that not-fat people and the airline can have a marginal gain.
If United passed a rule that said “all passengers need to stay within the boundaries of your seat”–a rule that would affect weightlifters, twitchers, and fat people alike–would you support it?
I support a one person/one fare rule. For everyone.
And if someone really does have a physical condition, including width of any part of their anatomy, that will cause them to occupy any part of an adjoining seat, they should be able to request that seat in advance at no extra charge pending presentation of official documentation of said physical condition at check-in.
Can’t do much about the giant phantom schlong dudes, though. Or the vomiters. Or the I-really-need-to-spread-my-important-work-onto-your-tray-table-and-sit-facing-the-window folks. They can’t document their conditions.
But I think a significant percentage of the complaints wouldn’t have happened if their seats were the same size they were 15 years ago. There were as many fat people then as now, believe it or not. Most people who flew used to enjoy flying, instead of considering a chore on par with visiting the dentist, and really, it’s not the fatassess’ fault that that’s no longer the case.
You “really, seriously doubt” that roughly 1 of every 100,000 passengers might have been sitting next to a person who couldn’t fit in the seat with the arm rests down?
Yes. I do. I’m figuring that not everyone sitting next to someone that size lodged an official complaint, and that the vast majority of fat people don’t require even one seat belt extender, let alone two, and can put the armrests down, albeit with some thigh bulge. But that’s not going to stop the ewww-it’s-touching-me crowd from complaining. So I’m thinking at least some of the complaints came from people who sat next to a fat but not two-seatbelt-extension-fat fatass. How many? I don’t know. But not 0%, no way.
You don’t seem to realize just how much the fat haters really do hate us, and how common they are. And they hate us even more when they think we might possibly be touching them, even if we’re not.
And their needs are considered paramount, not mine. It’s pure pandering to prejudice. If this really were about the gas it took to transport my fat ass, they’d be kicking all the 220-pound men off the plane, too.
Can you demonstrate that fat people haven’t participated just as much as the rest of us in driving down prices? If they have acted to benefit from low prices, rather than conscientiously patronizing airlines that offered wider seats at higher prices, they are even more complicit because they have been aware that they cannot fit in the size of seat they are buying and that they would fit in the size of seat offered in, say, the American Airlines program Sailorman mentioned. Have you any evidence that fat people, say, organized to support such programs? (And of course they need not do so alone; fat people fly with their non-fat friends and family, and have political allies who can support such efforts.)
If there was no effort among fat people to keep prices at a high enough level to support wide seating, then it is unfair that I who have paid for a seat into which I can fit am expected to give up some of that seat to accommodate a person who can’t.
Which effectively is the American Airlines program Sailorman noted; instead of buying the absolute cheapest ticket every time, fly AA instead. Or even today, fly Jet Blue and be guaranteed an almost 18″ wide seat. Or in the case of tall people, pay the extra money to get the exit row or bulkhead seats.
And where has “assigned seat” not referred to “all of that seat”? I don’t have to share my assigned seat space at concerts or other performing arts events; why have I not bought the totality of the seat, rather than whatever bit of it is convenient to be granted to me, when I am flying?
Again, you can’t point me to anything that says my seat is actually communal, and in the conventional understanding of what “buying a seat” means, it entails having all of that seat and the foot space in front of it. It always has been a favor asked to put your extra baggage in my foot space, for example, not something I owe you. It always has been by my neighbor’s grace at a concert that while standing for our favorite song I boogie incautiously into his space, not my right to do so.
Meowser,
“the vast majority of fat people don’t require even one seat belt extender, let alone two, and can put the armrests down, albeit with some thigh bulge.”
But if this were about “the vast majority of fat people,” then the complaints would be much more numerous than 1/100k. Fat people in the sense of people who are BMI obese are reported 30% of the population. If people were regularly freaking out about touching fat people — heck, only touching fat women — the complaint rate would be 3 of every 20 fliers. So it’s more reasonable to think that complaints are about people who are not merely BMI obese but who might actually have the body type that Amp described @ 27, i.e. unable to sit with the armrests down, and with the fellow passenger “uncomfortably pressed together for the entire flight, not just as the hip level but also in our upper bodies.”
Supposedly the “morbidly obese” are now 3% of the population, but that’s also based on goofy BMI measures; I’m willing to cut that by a factor of 30 to 1 out of a 1000 people are obese enough that it would be difficult for them to sit with the armrests down. If they fly in about the same proportions as the rest of the population (and as has been noted by commenters on this thread, seriously obese people are businessmen, academics, family members, etc.), that means 1 out of every 1000 passengers is obese enough to have difficult fitting in, say, Southwest’s 17.25″ seat with armrests down.
It’s impossible that of the passengers sitting next to those 1 out of 1000 people, 1% complained? Geez, I wish I believed enough in Americans’ ability not to be whiny that I thought less than 1% would complain.
As an honest debater, I will now put forward an interesting argument that my husband advanced. I was surprised that he disagreed with me because he’s usually Free Markets Man*, but his point was that airlines are common carriers — “one that is in the business of transporting the public, goods, or messages for a fee; or a company that provides telecommunications services, as by telephone or satellite, to the public.” Therefore, it should be a 1 person/ 1 equal-priced fare for the same reason that water utilities don’t get to charge more for water pumped to the person who lives up on the hill, and the same reason that he supporters net-neutrality. Because the government limits the number of flights by commercial airlines, the government has artificially capped the number of flights. Due to the limit of supply, the flights that are made have an obligation to be open to all on the same terms.
I don’t agree with him because:
a) I’m skeptical of his claims that common carriers were always obligated to carry everyone on the same terms. The airlines as Meowser noted in her OP had half-price fares for children, and the railroads as we know from Plessy v. Ferguson did not carry blacks on the same terms as whites. The common carrier is, like communism, an unknown ideal.
b) I do not agree with his and most of the anti-United commenters’ assumption that no one is buying a seat on a plane, only the right to be transported from A to B. The airlines describe what they’re offering as seats on the plane, not a place to be strapped against the wall or a take-your-chances spot in the cargo hold with the pets. They sell seats, and the flight is full or overbooked when they run out of seats.
* He is, however, a very tall FMM, and as I noted earlier always complains about his legs being cramped on flights, so he has a dog in the fight; he wants to be guaranteed sufficient legroom.
PG –
I’m unclear how you arrive at this conclusion.
Women tend to carry their weight in their hips and thighs. Men tend to carry their weight on the front of their bellies. Armrests come alongside your hips and thighs and thus restrict the available dimension of that area.
On airlines! This United policy is a new policy.
Sailorman,
In what way is a system that penalizes a group of people for a fairly fixed trait the same thing as the market system providing nicer conditions for more money? If you want seats where no one will impinge on your space, you have to pay more for them, you can’t demand that other people pay more so that you don’t have to sit next to them. Well, United says you can, but you can’t claim that it is the same as all the other ways by which people pay more money for their own benefit. This is demanding that other people pay more for your benefit.
If someone is incapable of fitting in their seat such that the other people in the row physically won’t safely fit, then I can understand requiring them to buy a ticket for a different seat, but that isn’t what this is. If you buy a tiny seat that you barely fit, then the chances that your row mates may impinge on your space goes up. If you can’t live with that, buy a different ticket.
Sorry I haven’t been participating in this thread today, but I’ve got a lot of non-bloggy work that I have to do.
Charles, I’ve been really fascinated by the idea you’ve been developing on this thread. But let me ask, do you think that it might make more sense to try and frame it as a result of tragedy of the commons, rather than as individual choices?
Of course, in the tragedy of the commons, it is individual choices at stake — everyone chooses to graze their sheep on the common grass. But people aren’t choosing to destroy all the grass so that no one can feed their sheep; that’s the end result of everyone’s individual choices, but it’s not what people are choosing.
Thanks for that last comment, Amp. That was kind of bugging me about Charles’ argument, but I didn’t quite know how to articulate it.
It’s not like we had Comfortable Expensive Air with wide seats, and then along came Cheap-O Air – We’ve Got The Smallest Seats in the Business! – and all the non-fat people rushed over to Cheap-O Air and forced Comfortable Expensive Air out of business, leaving fat people with no alternative.
It used to be that all the seats were bigger. Then the airlines got into price wars. Everyone – fat and non-fat alike – preferred to buy cheaper tickets. But at first the seats were the same size. At first, the cost cuts were in amenities that many people felt they could do without (remember when everyone hated airline food? At this point I’d love to have some airline food to hate on instead of bringing a PB&J or pay $5 for a bag of chips). But the seats were the same because they didn’t immediately retrofit all the airplanes when they started lowering fares. Then they ran out of other things to cut and airlines started cutting seat size to improve their margins. Tragedy of the commons indeed.
Personally, I’d be okay with the Canadian-style surcharge for a second seat for those who cannot fit in a regular seat for whatever reason. But that’s not really how we roll, is it?
Fascinating discussion.
One way to look at this matter is more or less clinically, as a question of property law and price design. And I may do that later.
That analysis, however, ignores culture. Different people have different cultural sensitivities. Some Americans might scoff at the sensitivities of Arabian women that express offence at being asked to remove their veil for purposes of a driver’s licence photo. What good is a photo ID if you can’t identify the person in the photo? Yet the same Americans might express outrage at being strip-searched as a check for contraband before getting on an airplane. I suspect that people from cultures that don’t emphasize clothing would find it difficult to understand our sense of violation. The point at which disclosure becomes offensively intrusive can only be appreciated within the context of a given culture.
I sense the idea of discriminating on the basis of bodily characteristics triggers strong emotions in some people. Societies strive to accommodate cultural sensitivities to the greatest extent possible, mostly by treating them as taboo. That is, even when there might be an arguable link between a legitimate end and a policy for promoting that end (a goal of keeping contraband off a plane, and a policy of strip-searching all passengers) cultural norms will tend to keep certain policies from being implemented.
That is, until the cost of maintaining the cultural norms becomes too high. I understand that in Iraq and Afghanistan more suicide bombings are being carried out by women. Initially such bombings were carried out by men; cultural norms discouraged women being put in harms’ way. With the heightened awareness of suicide bombings by men, insurgent forces have modified their aversion to employing women as bombers. Women have the advantage of being expected to wear loose-fitting attire, and cultural norms discourage intrusive searching of a woman’s body. I expect there will be increasing pressure to modify these norms in response.
Airlines have been losing money since time immemorial. They’ve been such perennial money-pits that the investor Warren Buffet is alleged to have wished to have been at Kittyhawk when the Wright Bros. had flown their first plane, so he could have shot the damn thing down. Financial pressures have cause airlines to surrender one cherished norm after another. I expect the United people thought long and hard before creating a policy that discriminates on a criteria that’s going to provoke such strong emotions.
I find a reasonable relationship between body size and airplane accommodation, so I don’t find (what I understand of) United’s policy to be irrational. But I suspect cultural norms played a role, too. It’s fair to acknowledge all the OTHER groups of passengers that United’s executives have not chosen to seek additional compensation from. There may in fact be good reasons for imposing additional fees on people traveling with seeing eye dogs. I just suspect that the executives anticipate the firestorm of protest they’d get for seeming unsympathetic toward people with disabilities would make such a policy too expensive, no matter how rationale it might seem. In contrast, those same executives have determined that the protest they’ll get regarding their propose body size policy won’t be as harsh, and may come with some offsetting benefits in the form of increased patronage on behalf of people who have felt aggrieved by sitting next to an oversized passenger.
To recap, do I think some people regard their fat neighbors with horror and disgust? Sure. Do I think that fat people are acutely aware of, and highly sensitive to, this fact? Sure. Are either of the foregoing statements inconsistent with the idea that there’s also a rational relationship between body size and airline service? No.
Do I think United executives adopted their new policy exclusively out of personal feelings of revulsion at their fat neighbors? No. Do I think United executives adopted this policy purely as an abstract exercise in cost allocation? No. Rather, I suspect United executives are constantly confronting a list of uncomfortable choices in an effort to avert another bankruptcy, and decided that this new policy is among their least bad options. They concluded that the policy bears some rational relationship to their goals. And they concluded that the public does not believe the need to make accommodations for obese people holds the same moral claim as the need to make accommodations for, say, blind people.
That is, I suspect they look on this matter as both a matter of cost allocation and of cultural navigation. It’s not either/or; it’s both/and.
Yeah, I think it is accurately framed as a tragedy of the commons, but I think in the case where one group of people has decided that the solution to the tragedy of the commons is that everything would be better if they could just kick those people off the commons, it is important to emphasize the degree to which it is all of us as individuals who have chosen to make the commons a tragedy, and that claiming that the other shepherds are taking our rightful grass is a selfish and unproductive delusion.
I think Amp and others correctly observe that the consequence of many individual decisions has been to drive airlines to a strategy that focus on low price, not high quality, for coach seats. For what it’s worth, I use the term Tragedy of the Commons to refer to a somewhat different dynamic, wherein individual decisions about the use of a common asset lead to an unsustainable situation. It is not clear to me that low-cost airlines are not sustainable – at least, not for the Tragedy of the Commons reasons.
As PG repeatedly asserts, anyone who likes the old style (circa 1980?) of flying can have it, mostly; it’s called First Class, and it comes at a price that people who liked the old style of flying should be accustomed to paying. So, while individual decisions have driven airlines to focus on low cost, the alternative option has not been lost. I’m not seeing the “Tragedy” here.
Rather, I think I’m simply observing frustrated expectations. That is, I think people who have grown accustomed to one way of dividing up costs and benefits are reacting with surprise (and dismay) that a firm is proposing – with respect to future flights – to re-allocate those costs and benefits. For example:
Right. And while we’re at it, by what right do you insist that I not smoke on a plane? People have been smoking on planes since commercial aviation began, and therefore any proposed change represents an infringement on my expectations – and expectations are basically the same as property rights, right?. And besides, I can’t help smoking; nicotine’s addictive, you know. Yes, I know most people don’t smoke, and think that smoking is icky. That just proves that this anti-smoking campaign is part of a moral panic designed to oppress an unpopular minority. Why should I give up my traditional right to smoke just to accommodate your supposed claim to your airspace? What could be more discriminatory, more selfish?
Conceptually there’s little difference between the claims of the smoker and the non-smoker; each one asserts a right that intrudes upon the interest of the other. For decades the interests of smokers prevailed; recently there’s been a change of fortune. And, to be sure, the change was accompanied by a growing sense of moral aversion to smoking. Is this a fair analogy?
Or are rental cars a fair analogy? If I’m too big to fit in a sub-compact comfortably, or if I have a medical condition that limits my ability to get in and out, is it fair that the rental car company charges me more for renting a larger car? After all, it’s not my fault that I can’t use the smaller car. Heck, I’d love to get the mileage the smaller car affords. Now I not only have to forego that mileage, I have to pay extra for the privilege. Isn’t it incumbent upon the rental car company to rectify social inequities?
How ‘bout electricity? Traditionally electric utilities have recovered their cost of service by charging households in proportion to the number of kilowatt-hours (kWh) they use, regardless of when they use them. Obama has been talking about Smart Grid technology which would, among other things, facilitate charging households different rates depending on the current cost of acquiring (generating) electricity. Basically that means paying more for using electricity during the day and less at night. People who can change their schedules will benefit; people who can’t will likely see higher rates. Is it fair to ask people who are NOT changing to bear the cost of a social change? And, hypothetically, what if nobody changes their behavior? People who are night owls will reap a windfall while the rest of us will bear new costs. Should I interpret this change as night owls reaping a benefit at my expense? Or should I interpret this as night owls finally deriving the benefit of their low-cost behavior, and the rest of us finally having to bear the full cost of our high-cost behavior?
Price design is a fascinating field: How should a firm set its prices, especially for thing such as an airline ticket – a product that is almost perfectly perishable, is produces as a co-product with a hundred other airline tickets, and designed to recover steep fixed capital costs (among other things)?
The first thing I would offer is that, to the extent markets are competitive, vendors don’t exercise a lot of real discretion. And the airline industry is brutally competitive. Bottom line: Any accommodation to one party reflects a subsidy by all other parties.
On average, the ticket revenues from each flight must recoup the operating cost of the average flight (including depreciation of capital assets) and provide a return on investment sufficient to permit the firm to attract whatever investment will be necessary in the future. For conceptual ease, let’s say each flight must recover its operating costs. If we require larger people to buy two airline tickets, that will mean that more tickets get sold. The average price per ticket can be lower. If, alternative, we don’t require larger passengers to buy to tickets, then the airline must recover its operating costs from the sales of fewer tickets; on average each ticket must cost more.
(Yes, this analysis includes many simplifying assumptions. I believe it reflects relevant overall dynamics nonetheless.)
More to the point, a policy requiring larger passengers to buy two tickets will put financial stress on the larger passenger, but will relieve both financial and physical stress on other passengers on the plan. A choice not to require the larger passenger to buy two tickets will not impose the same financial stress on the large passenger, but will instead impose both financial and physical stress on the other passengers. Neither policy choice is costless. And neither choice creates new costs. The choices merely represent two ways of allocating existing costs.
This isn’t really tragedy of the commons; that refers to a situation where individual incentives applied to common area use result in a situation where the total usefulness of the commons degrades. i.e. federal grassland overgrazing: Everyone could reduce their profits by taking off 5% of their cows, and if everyone did that then the grasslands would work forever, and collectively they’d all be better off. But since one person taking off her own cows alone won’t affect the viability of the grasslands, she has no incentive to do it. So nobody does it, which ruins the grasslands for everyone.
TOW doesn’t apply here. Here, the cheaper seats provide a significant (cost) benefit to most people. this isn’t tragic, it is apparently what people want.
Charles, you keep talking about penalties. but obviously we’re simply discussing relative differences, so it’s not clear whether it is a penalty or a benefit. IOW, whether this is framed as a penalty (be penalized by being forced to pay twice as much for a seat) or an inability to claim a limited benefit (denied the opportunity to sit in a single, cheap, tiny, seat) is a matter of framing.
But it’s important framing, because it has to do a lot with rights. If people have the right to sit in any seat which is sold, whether or not they fit, then it is properly framed as a penalty. You deny someone access to a right, you are penalizing them.
but if you don’t start from the idea that everyone has a right to sit in every seat they want, then the ‘narrow cheap seats only if you can fit’ model becomes no more different from the sale of other, unrestricted, first class, seats.
From my perspective, your model seems logically less tenable in the face of your apparent non-protest to all of the other classes of seats out there. Can you explain how it fits in?
Your archane reasoning has lost me, (OK, bored me).
So if I’m a considerate fat person, can you state clearly exactly can I do to please you in regards to flight ettiquette?
I’ll file it for future reference.
Elusis @ 61: I’m thinking about love handles, which show up on men a lot earlier in the fat accumulation process than on women (women will first accumulate fat on thighs, butt, hips, breasts; from what I can see the love handles on men accumulate in tandem with the gut), and which seem to pose a more obvious impediment to armrests being down than the hips and thighs would.
Charles S. @ 62: You seem to be taking a legal realist view: regardless of what the written rules are (and FAA Order 8900.1, Vol 3, Ch 33, Sec 3, Para 3-3483 does require personnel to ensure that armrests are in the normal forward/down position for takeoff and landing), if you haven’t seen those rules being uniformly enforced, they’re not really the rules, and a regime in which the rules are uniformly enforced actually constitutes new rules. Thus if people have been allowed to use seating space in a semi-communal manner, rather than being strictly mandated to stay within their own seats, the rule is not that anyone actually owns his seat space but rather that one is entitled to enough seat space to accommodate one’s size regardless of whether one has actually purchased that seat space.
I am skeptical of legal realism generally, and most particularly in situations where the immediately relevant authorities acknowledge that there are in fact such rules and that they ought to be enforced even if doing so right at that moment (say, after the plane door has been closed) is not practical. (I find legal realism more plausible in situations like intimidation of black voters by whites where the sheriff is one of the intimidators and refusing to enforce the written rules even to the extent practically in his power.)
If there always was a written rule against graffiti, for example, and a police officer who was feeling particularly energetic would enforce that rule, then such a rule does exist. A “no broken windows” regime of enforcement is not a new rule; it’s simply a more uniform enforcement of the existing rule.
PG,
The other problems with charles’ argument is the conclusion. Even if people have been able to use seats in a semi-communal manner without causing complaint, and even if you take a legal realism view, that does not mean Charles is correctly stating the “new rule.”
The example given above does not (to me) imply that the rule is “A traveler gets to use enough seat space to accommodate her size.” It could equally be interpreted to mean that someone gets extra room so long as extra room is available and nobody else minds or complains, i.e. if the semi-communal model is working.
When I was larger, this wasn’t true of me (and I’m fairly typically shaped for a fat man, I think). My thighs and hips were the impediment to having the armrests down all the way, not my — hate this phrase — love handles.
Sweet Machine at Shapely Prose reports on her recent experience with United’s seats and the inherent sexism of their rule.
Actually, I have no doubt that United is well within their legal rights (and even more within their legal rights as they would be adjudicated by the courts, since the courts have a well established aversion to treating fatness as a disability). I am taking a social/moral realist position. The rules as they are enforced are the rules. A change in the enforcement of rules is a change in the rules. A privilege you have that is completely ignored by both the existing authorities and social rules is not a privilege you have.
I agree that tragedy of the commons isn’t really the issue. The issue is a race to the bottom.
Actually, the issue is that the airlines have completely failed to either themselves effectively present seat size information or get the ticket brokers to effectively present seat size information. I suspect that a major part of the reason that the airlines have failed to successfully market more expensive tickets for slightly larger seats is because that information is invisible on all the major travel broker sites (orbitz, travelocity, etc). I actually routinely upgrade to the longer legged seating on flights where those seats are still available when I check in, but I have never bought those seats initially because there is no easy mechanism to specify those seats when I am purchasing my tickets.
All of the existing classes of seats are based on an “If you pay more, you get something better.” As a former communist, I have little love for that structure, but I understand that it is how our society is structured. None of the other seat classes are based on a rule of “If it will inconvenience your neighbor for you to buy this seat class, you are forbidden from buying it.”
We don’t have a rule that people flying with small children must purchase an entire row, and flying next to someone else’s screaming child is certainly more unpleasant and invasive of my space than flying next to someone whose thigh is forced by the confined space to touch my thigh.
Banning a class of people from purchasing a type of ticket for the benefit of other people purchasing those tickets is the exact opposite of how all other ticket classes are handled. If United created a class of more expensive ticket where people who couldn’t fit with the armrests down were given two seats, thereby improving conditions for everyone in that class, that would be an extension of the normal pricing structure. United’s new policy is not.
Nobody.really’s examples of smoking bans and rental cars also fail as parallels: smoking bans forbid a class of people from engaging in an activity while flying in cheap seats, but they don’t require smokers to buy double priced tickets. A smoking ban actually has a closer similarity to the decrease in seat sizes itself. Smokers aren’t forbidden from flying or forced to pay double, they are just made to fly in even greater discomfort than the rest of us. Tiny seats don’t force fat people to not fly or pay double (except on United), they just force them to fly in even greater discomfort than everyone else. Likewise, rental car companies will rent a sub-compact to anyone willing and able to physically fit in a subcompact. They don’t care if your thighs is pressed against the parking brake and the door or your head against the roof and your knees against the steering wheel. As I said, I can understand an airline requiring a passenger who physically takes up two seats to purchase two tickets (although I would favor a policy in which size is treated as a disability requiring accommodation), but requiring someone to pay double because their size combined with the tiny seats inconveniences their neighbor seems punitive.
[Goofy message deleted.]
No more letting infants fly free on their parent’s lap? Perhaps there’s some merit in that….
Aren’t you describing First Class tickets?
This strikes me as accurate. But it also strikes me as missing the point of the policy.
I don’t mean to deny the existence of discrimination against fat people. At the same time, I don’t think it helps the conversation to deny the existence or interests of all OTHER people.
And, while I can’t actually claim to know the subjective state of mind of the people who devised United’s policy, I suggest that the policy may not have been adopted for the purpose of persecuting their fat customers. It may have been adopted for the purpose of promoting the interest of their OTHER customers who are sitting next to their fat customers.
Again, an accurate statement, and again I fear I failed to make my point. The point was to provoke reflection on WHY government/airlines forbid smoking. If you look on the policy solely from the perspective of the smoker, it may seem like a mean-spirited way to oppress a disfavored minority. And, indeed, I can’t deny that the policy has that dynamic. Yet if you broaden your perspective to also take in the interests of people OTHER than the smoker, the policy may take on a different appearance.
Good point. And why don’t they? Does the fact that such a customer would have no effect on any of the rental car’s OTHER customers – that the discomfort he feels is discomfort he inflicts solely upon himself – have any bearing on the rental car company’s attitude? In contrast, if you drive a rental car in a manner that damages it, rendering it less serviceable for the OTHER customers that would use it after you, the rental car companies take a very different attitude. But it’s an attitude that can only be appreciated if you expand your focus beyond the initial customer and take in the interests of other customers.
And I think this is an excellent point. Indeed, when I wrote my hypothetical about charging more for flying with a seeing eye dog, I had initially written about charging more for flying with kids. Now, two questions arise:
1. WHY don’t airlines charge extra for noisy kids? Dunno, but I could hazzard some guesses. First, culture: it would look like a tax on childhood innocence and motherhood. Second, logistics: how can you know which kids will be noisy at the time you sell the ticket? Third, charging extra wouldn’t actually solve the problem of noisy kids bugging other passengers. Perhaps charging extra to have the kids fly in a sound-proof room…?
2. What do you think about the fact that you are subjected your neighbor’s noise? Do you find that desirable? Would it really be a terrible thing for noisy kids to fly in the sound-proof “family” part of the plane? And would it be a terrible thing if they had to pay extra for that service?
True, this idea may be unconventional. Does that make it bad?
Charles S.,
OK, so you don’t believe that written rules actually count as rules if you don’t consider them to have been enforced. But here’s the thing: the “privilege” of actually possessing the seat for which you have paid and having it be within your discretion whether to share that seat with others is recognized both by the relevant authorities and by social rules.
If it weren’t recognized by the social rules, the man sitting next to Amp who was pressed up against him wouldn’t have been apologizing. People apologize when they breach a social rule (e.g. step on your foot or go into your space).
It is recognized by the relevant authorities because otherwise United wouldn’t care about getting those complaints regarding seat infringement, which as I’ve noted were a tiny percentage of all complaints they receive and a really, really tiny percentage of all the passengers they serve. If passengers are *expected* to squash onto each other, why did Virgin Airlines pay a woman $20,000 for having another passenger move into her space?* No one gets to collect money for having a screaming baby on the flight, because the airline hasn’t sold you a quiet flight — just a seat.
People tolerate infringements of social and legal rules all the time. Cops often tolerate minor infringements of the speed limit because it’s generally not worthwhile for them to pursue all minor infringements, but that’s still the speed limit and you’re not going to be able tell the cop, “That posted 60 mph isn’t the real rule because you didn’t enforce it until the end of the month when you needed to make up some tickets.”
It’s a violation of social rules to cut in line, but people will tolerate it if they’re not in a hurry and you have a reason and are apologetic to them about it. Again, good luck casually cutting in line and claiming “Hey, you have no privilege to go in the order you got here if you let someone else cut in line.”
* In that incident, the airline didn’t say to the woman, “Oh, but you don’t really have a seat, you have a communal space that you share.” Instead, they said there was nothing they could do as the plane was full. The airlines certainly are telling us that we are buying seats, and you have offered absolutely nothing to rebut this. Your entire argument consists of “But lots of people have tolerated having the armrests up, therefore it’s not really the rule to have the armrests down.”
Elusis,
Sweet Machine seems to be perpetuating the idea, for which no one has provided any basis, that the United rule is “no touchy-touchy.” I’m not going to engage this claim any longer, especially when it seems pretty clear that the actual rule is that the armrests must be down for takeoff and landing, for which I’ve provided evidence ranging from FAA regulations to United’s own website. The situations in which someone has gotten money from the airline for space infringement has been when a fellow passenger couldn’t fit with the armrests down. Since Sweet Machine doesn’t claim that she had any trouble having the armrests down, her experience is irrelevant to the policy in question.
No more letting infants fly free on their parent’s lap? Perhaps there’s some merit in that….
Hey now. Let’s not get carried away.
Of COURSE we’re getting carried away. That’s the whole point of being on a plane, right?
I’m leaving on a jet plane. Don’t know when I’ll be back again.
@ 81: Ditto.
But if this were about “the vast majority of fat people,” then the complaints would be much more numerous than 1/100k.
Oh, dude, you ain’t seen nothing yet. This story having become the cause celebre that it is, thin people are going to feel a LOT freer to complain about someone being fat at them in the adjacent seat, even if our fat asses aren’t big enough to actually do them bodily harm. (And incidentally, people who are large enough to potentially injure someone in an adjacent seat are typically already buying a second one. That’s another reason I think a significant percentage of the complaints are going to be about fatasses like me, not people two and three times my size.)
And what do you think happens when Fatphobius jerkwadius in the seat next to me complains to the flight attendant that it’s touching me? Do you think the flight attendant:
a) Tells F. jerkwadius to go get stuffed, because I can buckle my seat belt just fine
OR
b) Orders me off the plane and tells me to wait for the opportunity to be double-charged for the first available double seat (which as we’ve established could take days depending on where I am)?
You seem to think either this scenario won’t take place, or if it does, that a) is the more likely outcome. I don’t. Because there are way too many overentitled shitheads out there, and if the flight attendant’s initial response is a) , F. jerkwadius will whip out, “But it’s your policy to remove them if I’m uncomfortable,” and demand to talk with a supervisor, and the supervisor will probably back up F. jerkwadius, especially if s/he has a frequent flyer card and I don’t.
And furthermore, I don’t get why someone has to be charged an entire coach fare for the use of what is likely to be a tiny percentage of a seat that’s going empty and unsold anyway. Aside from treating fat people like so much luggage with no feelings or lives or jobs, that’s just the dingle-cherry on the shit sundae for me. Not every airline, even if they make you pay something for an extra seat, will make you pay double.
Oh, and also: See the “FUnited” thread on Shapely Prose and read the comments if you want some examples of how even people who do buy second seats frequently get screwed out of them, or at least are heavily pressured to allow themselves to be screwed out of them. Imagine you do buy that second seat ahead of time for your fellow passengers’ comfort, and planes being stuffed to the gills as they are, they try to put someone in your extra seat and will shame and guilt you relentlessly to give it up. Happens all the time. And people HATE you for saying no and will make your life as difficult as possible over it. That’s the fun of being the fatass on the plane, you just can’t win.
Is there a second such situation? And is there any such situation in which the compensation was for “space infringement” without the element of injury?
Meowser,
Thanks for the pointer to the FUnited thread. The post there says exactly what I’ve been saying: the policy applies to passengers who cannot “lower the arm rest and buckle a seat belt with one extension belt,” not to a passenger whose hip might be rubbing against a fellow passenger’s leg. In other words, the flight attendant can hand F. Jerkwadius the printed, official policy and tell him to read it and not bother her again unless he can explain how there’s a violation of said policy.
Again, look at that FUnited post: such passengers
To be clear, the policy is not to charge the passengers who cannot fit into a coach seat with armrests down for use of an empty, unsold seat; it’s to charge them only if there is no such available seat. Now, if I’m aware that I can’t fit into the coach seat, I have a choice: I can buy two seats at the time of purchase, or I can gamble that there will be an unsold seat on the plane that I can use and thereby save money, aware that if my gamble goes wrong, I’ll be bumped from the flight and have to wait for the next available one with two seats. And at least on Southwest, if I do buy the two seats and it’s an undersold flight, I get a refund; I’m betting this will be United’s policy as well just so it isn’t sticking its neck out further than the competition.
I think people have made a lot of interesting points here, and I am sorry if I have not been attentive to the sex discrimination that may either motivate or be the effect of this policy, but I would prefer that people either address the existing “armrests down in compliance with FAA regulations” policy that United actually has, or state clearly that they’re talking about a hypothetical “no touching” policy.
Honestly, I was disturbed by the scaremongering that was done in the post that Elusis recommended, the “OMG if your thigh touches another person’s thigh they can throw you off the plane!” stuff. Is this seriously what people need to hear? Why can’t we stick to the actual policy and its effects instead of making one up to stress fat people out about their air travel? I was believing it and measuring my butt and hips and thinking, “Hmm, if I keep gaining weight I’d better not fly United at Christmas,” when the whole “no touching” thing is not the policy.
I saw one comment at the end of the Shapely Prose thread about someone’s being pressured to give up her seat, and that is indeed awful, but it’s also exceedingly unlikely to happen if the airline has proactively told people to buy an extra seat. I mean, how do you justify that? “We told you to buy a seat because you won’t fit, but we’ve now decided you do fit?” Either the armrests can go down or they can’t.
I also saw the comment from MsChilePepper who, like the woman on the Virgin Atlantic flight, was seated next to a very large person who couldn’t fit with the armrests down and who caused her a physical injury because of it. Is the idea here that we should just rely on the proactive good will of people to buy enough space, and if people don’t have such proactive good will and a woman gets hurt along the way (notice in both cases the injured person was a woman), that’s just the price we’re paying for treating everyone “equally”?
A lot of the rhetoric has been about how a policy like this treats people who can’t fit into the coach seat like they are non-human or don’t count. A policy of ignoring the suffering of women who are injured by having another person half sitting on them is not the solution.
I haven’t done extensive research into claims brought by passengers seeking compensation, so I couldn’t say how many such cases there have been, or whether there were any without the element of lasting physical injury. I would think without that element the claim would be difficult to win in court, especially now that U.S. judges are becoming increasingly conscious about tort abuses, and would be even more difficult in the rest of the world, where juries in civil cases are not mandatory.
But if seat space really were communal, why would Virgin have any responsibility for the passenger’s injury? She knowingly takes that risk by flying in a communal seat plane. It would be no better a claim than suing the airline if you get swine flu from another passenger; they aren’t claiming to sell you your own private oxygen, and you take that risk by flying commercially instead of leasing a plane. Any injury you get from the communal air is your own problem, so long as they are in compliance with any applicable public health rules.
A lot of the rhetoric has been about how a policy like this treats people who can’t fit into the coach seat like they are non-human or don’t count. A policy of ignoring the suffering of women who are injured by having another person half sitting on them is not the solution.
And if that extra seat doesn’t cost extra to book in advance — which I believe it absolutely should not — I can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t take advantage of it if they qualified for it. That’s the thing. No, that man should never have been crammed into that tiny seat. (Note that in the example you named, the woman he sat next to was over 300 pounds herself.)
That is the airlines’ fault. They should never have allowed it to happen. But they make it a lot more likely to happen by putting the burden on the fat person to pay twice as much to transport a single body as a smaller person. (And please note that very large people are much more likely to be impoverished, either doing menial work or living on disability, so the double-charge is something they simply cannot afford. Double-charging them, in many cases, is tantamount to saying, “You will never fly again.”)
I believe in Canada if you don’t take the offer of the extra seat when you book your ticket, and it turns out you don’t fit, and the flight is full, they can hold you off the plane until they get a two-seater available. But again, how often is that going to happen if the extra seat is free?
Also, while we’re at this, how small should the airlines be allowed to make their seats? We’ve already established that they are 2″ narrower than 15 years ago. They will make them smaller still, I’m sure of it. How narrow is too narrow? Or should they be allowed to make them as small as they want to, and if you don’t fit, tough shit?
You know, I’d heard about a guy who had to buy an extra ticket, and he said people still intruded on his space during the flight. So the next time he flew he also bought more than one ticket, but this time he was adamant that no one else use the seats he bought.
I don’t get how this part works, logistically. It sounds like if there are two unsold seats on the next flight, the fat person gets those seats at no further expense.* But if there aren’t two unsold seats on the next flight, the fat person gets charged double, and sits… where? If there’s only one unsold seat, the fat person is still too fat to use it, right? So do they bump someone at random to create a second empty seat for the fat person’s use? Do they jam the fat person into the one unsold seat and hope her seatmates don’t complain this time?
_______________________________
* Besides the inconvenience of missing her meeting/connecting flight/aunt’s funeral/other engagement.
iiii,
It might be easiest for us to think through this with scenarios, as I get confused thinking about practical things without using specific facts. I will refer to the person who cannot fit into a single coach seat with the armrests down, but could fit into a 1st/business seat, as “Jo.”
1) Jo attempts to book a ticket on a flight. At the time of her purchase, there is only a single seat left in coach, and one left in 1st/business. Jo can risk it and buy that single coach seat, thus putting coach at sold-out, figuring that for an 8am flight, someone else is sure to miss the flight, and she can use the extra seat.
1a) Jo’s gamble pays off. Either someone in coach misses the flight and she uses what would have been that person’s seat, or someone in business/1st does and the flight attendant either can move Jo to the bus/1st seat or can free-upgrade another coach passenger and let Jo use the two coach seats.
1b) Jo is wrong, and absolutely everyone shows up for the flight. She will not be able to use the single seat on that flight that she bought because it’s not enough space for her. If the airline then puts someone else who was going standby in what would have been Jo’s seat, then Jo’s bad gamble redounded to another person’s gain.
Jo has to buy two seats for the next flight available, which puts her at a higher priority than other people trying to grab a seat on another flight who have paid for only one seat each. If Jo didn’t pay for two seats on the next flight, there’s no reason she should have priority over two people who have each paid for a seat; indeed, it is appropriate for the airline to prioritize getting two people who have paid for two seats over a single person who has paid for a single seat.
2) Jo attempts to book a ticket on a flight and there are multiple coach seats left, and two coach seats on this flight happen to be cheaper than a single 1st/business class seat would be, so she books the two seats. (I assume she does this by phone because I don’t know how through something like Expedia you can book two seats without having two names for it. I guess you can use a name like “Jo’s Second” as it’s not like you need to provide them a SS# for each seat or anything.)
2a) Jo gets to the flight and it turns out that the flight is only half-full. She points this out to the gate agent and asks for a refund of her second seat, which refund is granted.
2b) Jo gets to the flight and it turns out that the flight is sold out, with people waiting on standby. She gets on the flight and sits down at her two seats. A flight attendant doing a visual check on how full the flight is* happens by and asks if she is holding the seat for someone. Jo holds up her two tickets and points out that she is abiding by the airline’s stated policy of requiring someone of her size to buy two tickets in coach. The attendant scuttles away.
It sounds to me that Jo would be wisest always to buy two coach seats (assuming two coach are cheaper than one bus/1st class), and if there ends up being a spare seat even beyond the extra one she bought, she gets her money back, because the flight was not a sold-out flight so it’s no loss of money to the airline if she uses two seats instead of one.
—-
* The visual check seems stupid to me, considering that we have computers nowadays and people are required to get swiped at the gate to get on the plane. If Jo has two seats, she should tell the gate agent and have each pass swiped through the scanner. The computer should know how many seats are on the flight, how many have gotten swiped and be able to subtract the latter from the former. Doing a visual check for empty seats risks putting someone in a seat that actually has been taken, say by someone who dropped his stuff in the overhead and then raced to the plane bathroom for a long dump, thus making his seat look empty when the attendant comes through.
But why should the airline have to lose money on being able to sell-out the plane? Suppose there are 150 coach seats at $100 each, 21 days before the flight date. Jo buys a $100 seat and checks the box saying she actually needs two coach seats. The flight is a convenient one for many people and all 148 left, after Jo’s purchase of one and free add-on of one, sell out. There’s a standby list of people who will pay for a seat. In order to transport Jo, the airline must take a known loss of $100.
Except it won’t happen if the airline has a stated policy that you can’t buy a single seat if you actually need two seats.
Actually, it means they will fly half as much as they currently do. Say the person takes 2 flights a year now; they will take 1 flight a year if it becomes twice as expensive. Just as at 1971 prices, they would have been able to afford flying once a year.
But why should the airline have to lose money on being able to sell-out the plane?
Once again, they’re not. The 80-cent surcharge on all the other tickets covers it. Even if it was as much as $5, that’s still not very much, really. If they really are sticking to the rule of only qualifying for a second seat if you need two seatbelt extenders, rather than leaving it to gate agent’s discretion whether to let someone on the plane or not based on whether they look “too fat to board” or not, or on F. jerkwadius to complain that it’s touching me, we are NOT talking about that many seats.
But what I’m saying is that there will be many people (mostly women) bumped who don’t need two seatbelt extenders, if this rule is allowed to stand. All it takes is one complaint, one gate agent having a bad day, and we’re gone. It won’t happen to all of us, and it might not even happen to most of us. But it should not be happening to ANY of us. Anyone who’s that squicky about possibly brushing up against my hip has obviously never ridden on a bus or subway. They need to get over it. I’m not enjoying it any more than they are, believe me.
Don’t you see? This is an airline’s wet dream. For as long as they’ve existed, they’ve had to beg and bribe people to get off their overbooked planes to make room. Now, they don’t have to, because about half of American women are going to have asses wider than 17″ across. So not only do they not have to pay us to get off, they can make us fly standby and pay double for the privilege and royally screw up our lives in the process and then be told that if we don’t like it we should be dieting harder and maybe becoming bulimic and having plastic surgery if we have to so we can fit — at least until they shrink the seats down yet again.
Incidentally, you didn’t answer my question about how small they should be allowed to make their seats. I assume by your non-answer that there’s no such thing as too small a seat, only too big a passenger?
Also, they are, for all intents and purposes, public transit. Airlines are not really private businesses; their formation and continued existence and operation is strictly regulated by the government. The government is who requires them to make everyone wear seatbelts and put the arm rests down and force everyone to sit down on command the whole time, remember? Otherwise they could have bench-style seats with movable seatbelts, hence no problem. They don’t make fatties pay double on buses or subways, and there’s no reason on earth they should be doing it in the air.
Actually, it means they will fly half as much as they currently do. Say the person takes 2 flights a year now; they will take 1 flight a year if it becomes twice as expensive.
Time for a privilege check. If you have a low-wage job or you live on disability, you are flying only when you absolutely have to. Like because your mother just died and she lived 500 miles away, and if you drive or take a bus or train you will lose your crappy low-wage job for spending too much time away, and it would be considered a voluntary quit because you chose to take a slower form of transit, so no unemployment for you. We’re talking about taking a plane trip like once a decade, maybe, if that. I don’t make a lot of money, although I’m not living in grinding poverty, and even I don’t fly more than once every couple of years. And I’ll be flying a hell of a lot less if I move cities where I can reach my family by train or car within a day. I used to love flying; now I’d rather spend the day in a dentist’s chair gagging on the x-ray biteplate.
PG,
Your description seems reasonably accurate if over optimistic in that the exemplary Jo seems to be extremely knowledgeable about her rights and immune to being shamed out of her rights. I’m unclear though why you think that that sequence of uncertainty and added expense and opportunities for harassment, fat shaming, and garning the hostility of the people around her is a reason trade off for other people avoiding a slight increase in ticket prices. I am also unclear how that doesn’t seem like a major change from current policies, and why Sailorman and nobody.really think that imposing such a set of rules on a fixed class of people is no different from having first class tickets or car companies being allowed to rent sub-compact cars.
Meowser @ 93,
Again, I have trouble understanding this stuff without specific examples. How does the airline know ahead of time to put a surcharge on every ticket? If Jo doesn’t buy a ticket until the point there are only two seats left on the plane and then makes a note saying she’ll need both seats, the airline will have to surcharge all of the other passengers after they’ve already bought their tickets. On a small plane (e.g. that used for D.C.-to-Charlottesville flights, which actually has a bench seat at the back), that’s definitely going to be more than 80 cents per person to make up for the free seat for Jo. If the airline imposes the surcharge after I’ve already decided which airline to take, now making the seat more expensive than a competing airline’s, I’m going to feel cheated — the airline pretended to have the cheapest fare and then at the last minute charged me more.
I apparently can’t shake your conviction that this standard is based on aesthetics rather than on a rather easy test: can Jo fit into the seat she purchased with the armrests down? If she can, that was the appropriate seat for her to purchase; if not, she needs either to upgrade or to buy two coach seats.
If airlines were so eager to boot people off the plane randomly, they’d enforce their policy against having drunk people on the plane much more harshly than they generally do. Sometimes they will enforce it more, as with your example of the crabby gate agent, but the interesting thing with the intoxicated passenger is that it is a judgment call rather than the objective measure used for whether a passenger can fit into a seat. The FAA leaves it to the discretion of the gate agent and other personnel to determine whether someone is OK to fly. United’s policy is not based on discretion.
I think if a particular airline wants to run its business such that only supermodels and adolescents can fit into its coach seats, it is free to do so. It’s not a business model in which I would invest money, and obviously not a business I could patronize since I need almost 17″ and I wouldn’t fly an airline that left bruises on my hips and thighs. As we’ve seen with other airlines that tries to cut too many corners, customers will refuse to fly airlines that make flying intolerable and such airlines will go out of business.
But there’s a big market in airline seats, so I don’t see the need for the government to regulate seat sizes, except of course if the airlines show an antitrust-law-violating pattern of making the seat size change all at the same time. (Airlines are frequently investigated and prosecuted for suspicious coincidences in how they are run, e.g. if both Virgin and British Airways impose the same fuel fee at the same time.) If the airlines engage in such parallel conduct with seats, then consumers can’t show a preference for decently-sized seats because none such will be available at all — thus the law already forbids it.
First, as I just noted about the small planes on the D.C. to Charlottesville route, some do have a bench seat at the back. So far as I know, bench seats aren’t inherently prohibited by the FAA so long as they still provide restraints of sufficient strength to keep passengers from getting flung about the cabin during turbulence. A Japanese woman was killed because she didn’t have her seatbelt on while seated, which is why in the last several years the pilot will say that you’re free to move about the cabin, but to keep on your seatbelt while seated in case of sudden turbulence and if you’re asleep with a blanket on, to belt over the blanket so the flight attendants can see. There may well have been an airline in the past that tried this and didn’t find it profitable.
Second, if you’re talking about city buses, they actually are run by government entities or are being contracted by government. Ditto subways. Amtrak is propped up by government subsidies in order to maintain nationwide service; the only really profitable part of their business is the Northeastern corridor. None of these are comparable to airlines, because no airline is run by the government or even assisted by subsidies. Dozens of airlines have gone out of business, including major airlines like Pan Am. Several still-existing airlines have gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy (the type which permits reorganization; Chapter 7 is liquidation). Airlines, unlike Amtrak, generally can decide to reduce or stop offering service on unprofitable routes.
The government can regulate an industry without the industry’s ceasing to consist of private businesses. The government heavily regulates the agriculture/food business through multiple agencies, ranging from the Department of Agriculture to the Food and Drug Administration to various state and local entities. Unlike the airlines, agriculture actually gets subsidies from the government to keep private businesses going when they might otherwise slip into bankruptcy in years where crop prices are low. Yet so far as I know, the government cannot order a particular, say, peanut butter manufacturer to start up a clean new factory to make almond butter so people with a peanut allergy will have that option. Indeed, peanut butter allergies have become so common that alternatives like almond butter, though often more expensive than peanut, have become widely available. There hasn’t been a market failure just because the food that peanut-allergic people can eat has a higher price.
The government could choose to impose a minimum seat-size requirement on airlines, I suppose, although most airline regulation are tied to safety (e.g. the FAA has a minimum width requirement for the aisle, to ensure that people can reach the emergency exits easily).
Meowser @ 94,
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, my aunt went into a coma last summer. Let’s look at what I paid to be able to get onto a plane quickly when I heard about the coma, hoping that I would be able to see her before she died:
Fare Breakdown
Airfare: 1,002.50 USD
Tax: 75.19
U.S. Flight Segment Tax: 7.00
U.S. Security Service Fee: 5.00
U.S. Passenger Facility Charge: 4.50
Per Person Total: 1,094.19USD
I wasn’t working full-time last summer and this was affordable for me because I could put it on a credit card and pay it off once I started my full-time job.
Is the idea that low wage-earning people (a person living on disability and without a job is irrelevant because you premised the necessity of getting there and back quickly on losing one’s job for taking too many days off) can afford over $1000 for a last minute fare (and this was supposed to be at the bereavement rate) if necessity arises, but can’t afford another $500 to pay for 1st/business class?
Also, FYI, the FMLA prohibits firing an employee who is taking leave due to a personal loss so long as he identifies it as such:
Charles @ 95,
I don’t expect Jo to be any more aware of her rights and responsibilities than a disabled person would have to be.
I’m unclear though why you think that that sequence of uncertainty
Why uncertainty? My recommendation was for Jo always to buy two seats and then if the extra is unnecessary, she gets the refund. If it is necessary, she’s avoided the possibility of getting bumped off the flight.
garning the hostility of the people around her
Why does Jo’s sensibly buying two seats garner the hostility of people around her?
is a reason trade off for other people avoiding a slight increase in ticket prices.
Because I don’t think I owe it to Jo for her to be able to get the lowest possible fare. If she can still fly and simply has to do it at the same prices she would have to in 1971 for a 1971-sized seat, why is she worse off? You want Jo to be able to enjoy 2009 coach prices despite her not being able to fit into a 2009 coach seat. I don’t see why Jo has such an entitlement. As I’ve noted, even people with legally-recognized disabilities aren’t entitled to two seats for the price of one. Why does Jo have such an entitlement?
I find merit in this argument; I much the same merit in the argument of smokers: “Anyone who’s that squicky about possibly of breathing my smoke has obviously never worked in a bar. They need to get over it.” I also find merit in the counter-argument.
But, to me, the issue isn’t a matter of who is right or wrong, but who gets to decide. Should the smoker get to decide the right level of sqickiness for everyone, and tell all the other passengers with different tastes and preferences to “get over it”? Or should some different decision-making mechanism apply?
Classical economics says that competitive markets drive price toward incremental cost. Two problems with this: First, most goods and services are not provided one-at-a-time; they’re contracted for and provided in bulk, so it’s hard to establish the incremental cost of any one good or service. Second, even within a class of common goods and services, there will be distinctions of quality. How should vendors of those goods and services set the price for each good or service? That is, to what extent do we identify a characteristic as warranting a difference in price, and to what extent to we overlook differences and just average things out?
Answers fall along a continuum. On the one end, there’s the one-time arm’s length negotiation between buyers and sellers of equal bargaining power, where everything is priced individually. On the other end, there’s total averaging, so-called “postage-stamp rates,” where a price is set based more or less on the average cost of the good or service, and all the unique components of any individual good or service are overlooked. Thus, in some restaurants you pay the price attached to what you order; in some restaurants you pay a fixed price for all you can eat, whether you eat a little or a lot.
But, because postage-stamp rates invite the possibility of gamesmanship and abuse, we often find SOME testing of the components of individual cases to see if they fall too far outside some standard. The post office does limit postage-stamp rates to packages of a certain size. Once a package gets larger than some standard, then a different pricing scheme prevails. Similarly, some internet service providers offer Unlimited Service*, and the fine print then specifies that people who use bizarrely large amounts of bandwidth within a month need to pay more. Electric utilities charge one kind of rate for small users (“households”) presumably reflecting the average cost of serving them, yet charge more individualized rates to large users (“industrials”) reflecting each of those customer’s unique characteristics. And in some bulk purchase contracts, a vendor can claim to have complied if it ships the quantity requested +/- 5%; shipments above or below that window trigger different terms.
Now, how should a firm set this threshold distinguishing between the average-all-together rate and the individualized price rate? It varies by industry. But because there IS a threshold – because no one smooth, continuous formula applies in all circumstances – the pricing structures can suggest a stigma. The people who negotiated the bulk purchase contract may have recognized that the cost of the vendor keeping shipments to within 5% of the order level was simply too large relative to the burden to the purchaser of getting a little to much or too little in any given shipment. They attached no shame to the idea that shipments might deviate by 5+%; they just needed to create a mechanism for compensating each other for this fact. Yet the vendor’s managers may later come to regard this 5% standard as a measure of success, and reward or punish employees based on their capacity to meet that standard all out of proportion to the actual cost of deviating from it.
Airlines have tended to charge one rate for everybody, regardless of unique characteristics. They have gradually been moving away from that model. They started charging more for people who wanted food, or upgraded beverages, or headphones, or use of the plane’s cellphones, or even blankets. They charged more for people who wanted to check extra heavy luggage, or an extra bag, or even any bags at all. Some charge more for people to reserve a bulkhead seat or emergency exit seat. And in the airports, they’re now charging more for people who want to charge their laptops and cell phones. And most of all, they’ve started charging a bizarre range of prices for seats based on whether you purchase your ticket 21 days in advance, or from Orbitz or Priceline. Airlines are hunting for ever more ways to distinguish between passengers, pandering to those that have the option to get a better deal elsewhere and shifting costs to everyone else.
I sense one problem with United’s policy is the fact that it’s discontinuous, that it creates a stigmatizing discontinuity between the “normal” and the “extraordinary” passenger. Imagine if airlines had bench seats and could sell access in, say, 3 inch increments. The seat backs would be padded just as today but partitioned into 3-inch strips, each of which could fold down as an arm rest. You’d make reservations for a specified number of seat-inches, and pay accordingly. The airline would match up seatmates to ensure that the total number of requested inches did not exceed the number of inches on the bench.
Under this pricing scheme, wide people would continue to pay more than skinny people, but skinny people would pay more than skinnier people. There’d be no stigmatizing discontinuity – or, at least, no greater stigma than the stigma that attaches between people who fit into a size 8 and a size 10 dress. Would such a system offend people less?
One final thought on cost averaging: Cost averaging is one net result of civil rights. When we adopted the Americans With Disabilities Act, for example, we required employers to make “reasonable accommodations” for people with disabilities. Were such accommodations costless? Sometimes yes, but sometimes no. Congress made a judgment that society should bear the cost of accommodating people with disabilities, even if this meant that the cost of all those accommodations would ultimately be reflected in the goods and services people consume.
I sense many people regard United’s policy as an offensive kind of discrimination, a failure to make a reasonable accommodation for a protected class of citizen. Should we regard obesity as a kind of disability for purposes of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and should we extend the burdens of that act to the relationship between airlines and passengers? (Or does it already apply? Not may area of expertise….)
Yet another fascinating aspect of price design! What accommodation should be made for the poor?
There are two major types of subsidies. In one, we regards something as so valuable that we subsidize it for everyone, rich and poor alike. In the other, we target subsidies to the poor.
The first kind of subsidy is hugely expensive, and delivers relatively little bang for the buck. The second type of subsidy delivers much more bang for the buck, but tends to convey a stigma; this kind of subsidy is also more vulnerable to political attack because it enjoys a smaller (and poorer) constituency.
In brief, if we’re concerned about pricing large, poor people out of the air travel market, does it make sense to subsidize air travel for ALL large people? Or would it make more sense to target subsidizes just to large, poor people and let all the other large people pay their own way?