[impendia]

> What I find extremely annoying is that no one is charge saw this coming.

I remember when US airlines started charging for checked baggage. Many more people started carrying on their bags, resulting in slower boarding and deplaning, and therefore problems for the airlines.

I read an interview with an executive at one of the airlines, saying that he didn't see this coming and was taken totally by surprise.

I am bewildered at how these people rise to positions of authority without even the most basic ability to predict obvious consumer behavior.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> I am bewildered at how these people rise to positions of authority without even the most basic ability to predict obvious consumer behavior.

Me too. It seems to be some kind of selective blindness as they'll happily pay advertising money in an effort to influence consumers and then not realise that consumers are influenced by product changes too.

[darby_nine]

I truly believe that to most people the "market" is just a magic force that operates in unknowable ways that magically resolve problems and make you happier (if you're rich).

[loloquwowndueo]

What’s amazing is that these days they always offer to gate-check bags for free to avoid fights for overhead bin space. So which is it, is checking luggage free or not?

All airlines suck!

[raydev]

They actually did predict the most important and obvious consumer behavior, because the airlines are making more money depsite the delays for passengers boarding/deplaning.

[blantonl]

There is no way that behavioral psychologists aren't on staff at all of the major US airlines. Everything in the airlines is a massive study in consumer and employee psychology - from cockpit resource management between captains and first officers to how people board an airplane, to how they queue up in the terminals.

You know damn well what happened - it was well known what was going to happen but the bean counters drowned it out and won out by enshittifying the process and "generating revenue"

[Larrikin]

Bean counter to me always meant accountants looking through data to squeeze out an extra one or two cents by slightly making their product worse. Like Papa John's over the past twenty years using a slightly worse cheese, pepperoni, etc and iterating over that until the product is unrecognizable.

Forcing a massive change all at once to shock the market, gain short term profit, and then change jobs to wreck a different company or industry deserves a different word.

[heliodor]

It could just mean he never tried to analyze it.