So here’s the challenge: Mergers creating ever-larger airlines have had a very mixed impact on the passenger population. Bigness tends to ride right over the competition, reducing pressures to hold the line on fares and fees, eliminating routes, staff and services, etc. So Southwest wants to buy Air-Tran. Shouldn’t I be cool to the idea?
Maybe not. The market likes the deal which usually is another indicator that the money guys favor things at the expense of the flying guys. The workers at the airlines are cautiously optimistic that strengthening the wonderfully and deservedly successful Southwest helps strengthen their positions as employees in a stronger company. The possibilities of new and better routes and facilities are positives, too.
Mostly, though, looking at this merger as a potential good thing, for me, flies on the truth that this makes a good company a little better. What’s bad when the bad guys do it isn’t necessarily bad when the good guys do it. Nearly alone in the field, Southwest has consistently served the consumer well. It has damped down fares and pressed bargains when the traditional carriers have sent prices soaring. It declines to milk the cash cow of cruel and outrageous baggage fees that the other carriers are gorging on at our high expense. It is a no-nonsense, or at least little-nonsense, outfit that does a good job for the little guy.
The small reservation is the very big matter of competition. Southwest, which is no new company at all, found its niche and then prospered mightily as an alternative to the behemoth carriers which had long forgot that the customer was anything but a sap. Not at all to begrudge them their excellent and welcome success, but Southwest’s swallowing up a smaller, niche competitor reduces the field wherein others might, too, challenge the grandees of the air with unique services, destinations or prices. There is some irony in that.
There was a time when I cranked up the eyebrow at WalMart’s vast success without thinking too much about it. Visiting the hangar-sized stores, though, I appreciated that the store offered goods to people at prices that were helpfully low to people who needed those low prices to get through the day. If WalMart can be made to play by the rules then goodspeed to them — even when that’s a mighty big “if.” In a way — with nearly none of the retailer’s challenges or charges of exploiting labor, institutional sexism, crushing of the system that feeds its pipelines and competes in the local community — Southwest grows by that service-low price-consumer model.
For a long time, Southwest was profitable when nearly none of its competitors were. It got that way by being smart and consumer-friendly. On the other hand, through high fees, diminished services and disdain for the customer — yes, including mergers — the others are profitable again. It is upside down logic to object to Southwest’s efforts to keep doing its good job competing with those banditos because of my reservations over what those others do.
Bigness may not be automatically good but I guess it may not be automatically bad either.
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