Bringing Freebies Back

Enjoying massive profits, airlines are giving us … peanuts

Did you miss airline snacks, friends? Those tiny, shiny packets distributed by smiling flight attendants whose contents maybe didn’t taste like much but were symbolic of the fact that we, even as airline passengers in Coach, were recognizably human? Of course you did. We all love freebies, even if they’re silly. (Air travel dehydrates; the last thing we should be doing at 40,000 feet is setting off salt bombs in our systems.)

Well, our long national nightmare is over. The “no free snacks” sign has been switched off and we’re free to walk about the cabin, chomping down on pretzels. And, in some cases, Stroopwafels (!?!).

American Airlines Group Inc. has followed United Airlines in providing free snacks for economy passengers after more than a decade without them. …

American stopped serving free snacks in 2003, while merger partner US Airways removed them in 2008.

United announced in December that it would begin serving the stroopwafel in coach. It ended free coach snacks in 2006, while Continental Airlines dropped them in 2010. The airlines combined to form United Continental Holdings Inc.

STROOPWAFELS. I fell in love with those in Amsterdam ages ago. The Dutch put them on top of their mugs of tea to let steam make them all gooey and soft before they take their first bite. The idea of being handed a Stroopwafel makes me want to go out and fly United this instant, which is a real achievement, since the last time I took a plane, only a few weeks ago, I ended up stranded in a small terminal with a husband and a toddler for seven hours, and no one would tell us anything, and the toddler was terrified of the auto-flushing toilet, which was of course the only toilet in the vicinity, and the whole experience was so tear-stained and frustrating that I shook my fist at the gods and vowed No more.

Come to think of it, at about hour six, the employees at the gate brought out a cart loaded with free snacks and told us all to have at it, and that did help mollify me. It’s amazing what a well-timed granola bar can do, especially if it serves as a kind of reparations. I acknowledge that you’ve been wronged, the granola bar seemed to say, which the gate attendants had not. I cannot compensate you for your thwarted plans, your ruined day, the fact that your toddler keeps crying about the scary potty and you’re living in fear that she’ll wet herself again and she’s already wearing the only pair of spare pants you brought in the carry-on. But I can offer chocolate chips, and that’s something.

Just how rich did airlines have to get before relenting on their No Peanuts To Plebes policy? Really fucking rich.

As the price of fuel has nosedived, America’s airlines have benefited enormously, raking in billions of dollars in swelling profits.

Consider the numbers. In 2015, Delta posted a net income of $4.5 billion, up from a mere $659 million in 2014. United Continental made $7.3 billion in profit, up from $1.1 billion the year before. Southwest’s profit nearly doubled to $2.2 billion.

Of course, budget hawks aren’t satisfied:

investors are antsy for airlines to make more money off passengers than they currently are. A metric called “PRASM,” which refers to passenger revenue divided by available seat miles, has been moving in the wrong direction, much to the chagrin of investors.

“U.S. airlines have been pressured by investors’ obsession with declining PRASM,” says Martin Sass, CEO of investment firm MD Sass, which owns Delta and American.

I guess we should be grateful we passengers get to benefit at all from airlines’ good fortune, then. That they are sharing the wealth — in some cases in the form of Stroopwafels, even! — is something to celebrate.

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