Actually that's much closer to the definition of a cost center.
A cost is a thing you need to pay but if you spend more on it you get very little benefit. Thus it has a binary nature or at least a nature where "good enough" is all you need. A profit center is something where if you make it better you generate more revenue. Therefore things like necessary infrastructure is a cost, whereas adding more routes is a profit.
Whereas I think you are confusing cost and profit to mean "important" and "unimportant". Not having your headquarters fall down is important. Having HVAC for your office workers is important. But no one is going to say "Let's choose this airline, have you seen how awesome the HVAC in their main office is? And how the foundation to their HQ is going to last a hundred years longer than their competitor?" But they will say "Let's choose this airline because it has a direct flight to where we want to go".
Thank you. In retrospect, I had a feeling something was off about my thinking, but I couldn't articulate where. Importance and profitability are different domains. They might penny pinch weather reports, and risk management probably characterized it as "low risk, high impact", saw "low risk" and underinvested.
Southwest's stock price seems to be unaffected by the outage. Southwest is down 0.28% on the day, but most of that drop happened at market open, before this incident, and is probably related to the S&P 500 being down 0.21% over a similar time period. Southwest's stock stabilized at shortly before 10am, and is actually up almost a tenth since then.
Seems to me the MBAs ran the numbers a while ago, and here we are.
The news wasn’t priced in yet. Stocks are usually not priced rationally and there is plenty of room for someone good at performing accurate corporate valuations to become handsomely rich. Case in point: Enphase (ENPH). How can a stock of a predictable solar-parts company be priced at $130 then $220, then $120, then $164? All within a 7 month period. Finally what MBAs are you referring to?
A cost is a thing you need to pay but if you spend more on it you get very little benefit. Thus it has a binary nature or at least a nature where "good enough" is all you need. A profit center is something where if you make it better you generate more revenue. Therefore things like necessary infrastructure is a cost, whereas adding more routes is a profit.
Whereas I think you are confusing cost and profit to mean "important" and "unimportant". Not having your headquarters fall down is important. Having HVAC for your office workers is important. But no one is going to say "Let's choose this airline, have you seen how awesome the HVAC in their main office is? And how the foundation to their HQ is going to last a hundred years longer than their competitor?" But they will say "Let's choose this airline because it has a direct flight to where we want to go".