patrick honner

There is an interesting article in the Times about a new kind of airline seat.  Amusingly called the SkyRider, it’s more squat than seat.  I think the look on this guy’s face says it all.

Not surprisingly, this is all about money–and a lot of it.  This seat has a pitch of 23 inches; pitch is airline jargon for the distance between a point on a seat and the identical point on the next seat, sort of like the wavelength of a wave.  On typical commercial aircraft, pitch is closer to 32 inches.  An airline could therefore install many more of these new seats, and of course, more seats means more tickets means more money.

For instance, on an aircraft with 20 rows of seats with a 32-inch pitc you could get almost 28 rows of SkyRiders in there.  That’s 8 extra rows, so about 48 extra tickets.  At two or three hundred dollaras per ticket, that’s a nice increase in revenue–on the order of an extra $10000 per flight.  You could even charge less for these seats and still make more money.

As bad as this sounds, it’s not nearly as objectionable as paying to use the bathroom on a plane.

I have a natural tendency toward the quantitative side of things.  That, together with a substantial history of employment in the food service industry, has doomed me to forever over-analyze menu prices.

I recently realized that my local bagel shop has been charging me an outrageous premium for premium cream cheese.  The cost of a bagel is 95 cents, and a bagel with cream cheese is $1.90; these are pretty standard prices around town.

But here’s the kicker:  a bagel with scallion cream cheese at this place is $3.25.  That’s an additional $1.35–not for the cream cheese, mind you, but for the upgrade of scallion cream cheese over plain cream cheese.

Scallions.  Scallions are like onion weeds.  I buy a bundle of ten of them for 40 cents, use three of them, and then toss the rest, probably because they’ve wilted within two days of purchase.  They are expendable stalks at the bottom of the vegetable pyramid–savory and crisp, yes, but almost literally a dime-a-dozen.  If anything, scallion cream cheese should be cheaper than plain cream cheese, because whatever volume of cream cheese is being replaced by the scallions is almost certainly more valuable than the scallions themselves.

The guys behind the counter seemed sympathetic to my argument, but they still charged me $3.25.