~by Haley Lynn Gray~
I’ve done a lot of flying — Peru, Ecuador, Florida, Texas, Arizona, all in a few months. And one thing I notice every single time is how much of the boarding process is spent dealing with carry-on bags.
The overhead bins fill. The last passengers have to gate-check. Everything slows down.
It’s a chronic problem that almost certainly costs the airlines a great deal of money — and it’s mostly self-inflicted.
The incentive that created the problem
Airlines charge for checked bags. Passengers respond exactly as you’d expect: they bring everything into the cabin instead.
The fee produces visible revenue. The consequence — slower boarding, delayed departures, aircraft sitting at gates, staff managing the overflow — produces hidden costs, and hidden costs get ignored because nobody’s bonus depends on them.
Contrast Southwest and JetBlue, who took a different view of the arithmetic. Faster turnarounds, fewer arguments at the gate, and passengers who don’t arrive at their seats already annoyed.
The lesson for your business
Measured costs get managed. Unmeasured costs get ignored.
That’s the whole thing, and it’s everywhere once you look for it:
The cheaper supplier whose errors cost you two hours a week. The discount that attracts customers who complain most and pay slowest. The leads dying quietly because nobody answers the phone — invisible, because an enquiry that never became a customer never appears in any report.
Every one of those is a real cost. None appears on a line item, so none gets attention.
How to find yours
Follow the whole process as a customer. Time it. Notice where you’d have given up. The friction you’ve stopped noticing is invisible to you and highly visible to them.
Ask what the saving is costing. Every efficiency has a second-order effect. Cheaper materials, slower service, fewer staff at the busy hour — what happens downstream?
Count the time, not just the money. If a process eats four hours of your week, price those hours. Most “savings” don’t survive that.
Watch what your pricing encourages. Charge for a thing and people will avoid it — sometimes in ways that cost you more than the fee earns. That’s the bag charge in one sentence.
The general principle
Before you introduce a fee, a rule or a shortcut, ask: what behaviour does this create, and what will that behaviour cost me?
The airlines chose to extract a visible fee and absorb an invisible cost. Plenty of small businesses do exactly the same thing, without the scale to absorb it.
