> In early December, a 35-year-old passenger from Tanzania was impressed to see that all the handles of the suitcases on the conveyor belt in the baggage claim area were facing the passengers.
> After the luggage is unloaded and collected in the cargo handling area upon arrival at the airport, ground support personnel manually align the handles of the bags and place them on the conveyor belt.
That's a level of attention to detail that we should be striving for in everything we build.
I think it also highlights something: better things are possible.
Zero lost suitcases doesn't require magic to achieve. It just requires enough workers or enough time to make sure each worker is able to do their job successfully. Unfortunately financial and time constraints mean that very often there aren't enough workers or enough time, and some passengers suffer.
Also requires a culture of respect for the people who are handling baggage - an important thing lacking in parts of society in the US, where working fast food is used as a pejorative.
The culture bit is the most important. You could add 100x the current headcount at all American airports and because the workers simply don't give a shit about doing good work, because they're treating it as a 9 to 5, where they have to go and suffer through a meaningless 8 hours, or worse, they treat it like their own personal access to other people's stuff to loot at will.
The TSA is security theater, a vast majority of American jobs seem to be competence theater. You only ever tend to see care and craft in small business and actual crafts. It's so rare that it's incredibly refreshing to find anyone in any business that bothers to do good work and take care of the small things.
It's not about respecting the baggage handlers. It's about a culture where you respect yourself such that you are obliged to do the best work you can, whether it's baggage handling, being a CEO, or flipping burgers. Self respect and respect for the job far outweigh any notion of employers or other citizens respecting baggage handlers. They have sophisticated notions of status and face and place in society that are sadly absent in American culture.
You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.
> You could add 100x the current headcount at all American airports and because the workers simply don't give a shit about doing good work, because they're treating it as a 9 to 5, where they have to go and suffer through a meaningless 8 hours, or worse, they treat it like their own personal access to other people's stuff to loot at will.
This places the blame solely on the workers. Their CEO earns a ludicrous multiple of their wage. They are treated like shit and are expendable. It’s a two way street, treat workers with respect and and you might get some respect from them.
Yep. The reason employees don't care about their work is that caring for their work is not valued. Box checkers and opportunists proliferate as loyal craftsmen get screwed over repeatedly.
> You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.
The hypothetical of dropping one baggage team into another airport might be true in an immediate timeframe but it doesn't address the core issue - each team was formed in a completely different society, one values celebrity and quick-buck scamming, one values planting trees that cast shade long after you're dead. Pretending like the influential people who steer the most economic activity aren't to blame at all for that difference in culture is insane, especially when we have a felon president who has been pardoning many high profile fraudsters.
Years ago I had an argument with my HR director at the time. I Was hiring for a position and I said I was willing to pay what was approximately 10-15% above market for the position at the time. He said he could get me a dozen prospects at the market rate or even ten percent below, that I was wasting my budget. I said, "I don't want the people who will work for that, the people I'm looking for know they're worth more." He repeated he felt I was over paying. I said, "look at my head count, and compare it to our competitors. I have half the staff but higher metrics in every category. You don't hear about major or long lasting IT problems here. I'm paying 115% but I'm getting 150% and overall spending less."
When your people feel respected and compensated, they work far better.
Them being paid better wouldn't resolve the issue. Updating American culture such that individuals respected themselves, had a sense of shame, operated from a baseline of respect and gratitude for the opportunity to be working in the first place, these things fix the issue. Concurrently, the CEO respecting the workers, the institution, themselves, would result in wages commensurate to their value.
Expecting excellence, putting care and craft into your work, is something that is taught, it doesn't just magically happen.
Paying these same workers more would not noticeably improve outcomes, people would still lose luggage, steal shit, and then have even more money to spend.
The workers and the CEO are products of their culture, and without some sort of specific intervention against the outcomes wrought by those cultural influences, things would continue as before. Serious institutions indoctrinate their members and build a culture oriented around expectations of excellence and care and craft.
Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.
That doesn't change unless the culture changes, which would change the regulatory environment, which would allow for things like excellent service and quality to be valued accordingly. America doesn't value excellence, it values "number go up."
I'm interested to hear why you think that better pay wouldn't help the issue. Being comfortable with your living situation and feeling like you're respected in excess of your boss's federal or state legal obligations plays a big role in having the wherewithal to put serious effort into whatever you're doing day to day, and it helps to mitigate the divide between the richest and the poorest among us / bad jokes or insults that originate out of fear of being poor.
> Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.
The federal minimum wage has been the same since 2009, but In-N-Out is an example of a company that chooses to avoid blaming the worker or the market or the regulatory environment for all of their business difficulties. They choose to pay well over the California minimum wage, and I don't find it coincidental that I've had better experiences with employees there vs some other fast food locations. Costco has made similar choices with how they treat their employees and they're doing great. No regulation needed, just better leadership.
The CEOs that blame "inevitable" market forces on why they have to treat employees poorly while refusing to look inward will ironically lose out in the market. And at a larger scale, probably the countries too.
It's certainly possible to find people who care about doing a job properly in a western society. Paying a bit more has been suggested on another post as a method of trying to achieve that, but I'd argue that that is necessary but not sufficient. You need to not only pay people a bit more, but also screen them very carefully for the attitude of doing the job properly.
It is a cultural problem. Just paying a bit more won't fix it. By paying a bit more, you might be able to get a larger share of the limited portion of people in the society that care, but you're not changing the people fundamentally, just being more selective.
Sorry, it’s acceptable to mistreat luggage because the CEO’s comp is higher than yours?
They are paid less.... you know there are rich people in japan?
> financial and time constraints
I read this as "profit focus"
Something I noticed when I traveled to Japan was how many workers there were just doing things. Attention to detail is so amazing. Things as simple as guiding people in the sidewalk while construction vehicles exit the site has a person dedicated to it
> financial and time constraints
What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.
Its like the news reports that say "an officers weapon was discharged and someone died at the scene", rather than "a cop shot and killed a guy".
> What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.
This is a very limited view of why things don't work. The main issue in my experience is whether the company values the outcome and ensures focus on optimizing for it. That can include everything from adequate staffing to comp to training to management focus. (A lot of the last one.)
You can spend a huge amount of money and still get a crappy outcome. US healthcare provides a rich field of examples.
US healthcare is a leader in administration fees (e.g. paying health system executives) compared to other countries around the world. High US healthcare cost isn't because of increased usage, but because of the higher admin fees and higher prescription drug prices. Prices are fixed high because law prevents the government from negotiating prices (o.b.o. Medicare/aid), and those provisions were inserted on behalf of pharmaceutical companies so their executives could make more money.
Paying individual workers more may have some benefits, but I think the key issue is usually overworking and burnout because the incremental cost of adding a whole new employee is way higher than just pressuring workers to do more work in the same time.
Also you need to keep organized crime out of airports. Some percentage of lost luggage is actually stolen luggage. Misrouting is also another large percentage. In the US unclaimed lost luggage ends up in some gigantic warehouse in Alabama.
What percentage? I imagine it is insanely low. The risk to reward ratio of making money off a random bag at the airpot has got to be as low, if not lower than, the actual percentage stolen. One thing I've never been worried about it is organized crime, or anyone really, stealing my bag at an airport.
Oh why even mention time constraints, we all know damn well it's financial. Every corp on the face of the earth is constantly cost-cutting everything to the bone to justify more bonuses and higher executive compensation, while making sure the service or products provided are just barely good enough where people don't stage outright riots.
In the sixties, the C-suite earned 21 times what the line worker did. In 2024 it's almost 300 times. So every single time you're dealing with a product that's been value-engineered to where it barely functions, or service people paid too little and empowered too little to actually help you, or stuck in a long ass line because they won't hire enough people, or stuck talking to some damn robot because people are expensive, it's beyond a safe bet that you have an executive or several to blame.
We should be spreading our cynicism over both management and customers. There is almost no level of service so terrible that people won't buy cheaper airline tickets. Let alone losing luggage, you could dial up the risk of death and people would still buy the cheaper tickets.
We need shame, really, societal shame that we inflict on those who have to take government benefits, perhaps. Flying an airline that's known to treat their employees like shit should cause the people at the cocktail to look at you strange.
(We kind of have something like this in that shopping at Costco is considered "good" but lots of people won't admit they shop at Walmart - I'm sure they'll be bankrupt soon given how many people don't shop there!)
Not sure if this is sarcasm, but Walmart earnings continue to rise. Being embarrassed to shop at Walmart is largely a coastal elite bubble situation.
For a more applicable example of shame, buying "cheap Chinese crap" is usually looked down on by all demographics or alignments.
That was the joke, everyone (at least in the coastal elite) says they don't shop at Walmart, but they exist everywhere.
Same with "cheap Chinese crap" - everyone decries it, but apparently everyone is also buying it.
What I meant is that most people do admit to shopping at Walmart with no embarrassment. Not the same for buying CCC. They still buy it but they know they shouldn't. Shopping at Walmart isn't like that.
There's also something about the collapse in civility. Or... something. If you asked a plane full of passengers if they'd be happy to get their suitcase 5 minutes earlier even though it meant someone else lost theirs a lot of them would say yes.
I think we can lay the blame for this on the wealthy elites, too. When people see someone better off than them greedily destroying society for their own personal gain, they naturally think "well why not me, too?".
I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce? Or is that a consequence of fifty years of stagnant wages?
I'm sure it's a healthy blend of both, but IMO, if you want to see this actually change, the first thing to even make it tenable as a possibility is the owning classes need to let some money flow down the hierarchy. Like I'm sure we'll always have our misers, our people who refuse to spend a penny more for anything, but I think the vast majority of the time what drives people to shitty retailers selling crap-quality products is that most people are fucking broke.
> I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce?
Yes.
The price-driven market segment will never disappear and is an emergent property of human nature and the dynamics of a marketplace where prices are instantly comparable.
Plane tickets are way more affordable for nearly everyone than they used to be, but price competition is more savage than ever. The marketplace has spoken.
While I agree that concentration of wealth at the top is a major problem, I don't think that shaking loose that wealth will change the price dynamics of the airline industry in the slightest.
Well not every one on the face of this earth as that’s where Kansai airport is located. It happens a lot in America and other places too but not everywhere
I find that the US is the most likely country to have this attention to detail.
real world user interface done right
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In the airplane industry, KPIs and beancounting are just a response to a mindbendingly price-driven marketplace — to the extent that consumers need to be protected by regulations from flying in unsafe planes.
I agree that there's an issue about western capitalism, but I don't think it's in the tension between middle management and craftspeople who take pride in their work. I think the problems arise at a higher level, with the modern-day aristocracy of the capitalist ownership class and the slice of the pie that they capture.