Miloch wrote in
:

https://jezebel.com/airlines-discove...lying-worse-18
39193635

Worried the terrible customer service, tiny seats, baggage fees, lack
of food, and frequent cancellations might not be quite enough to make
customers completely miserable while using their services, airlines
have decided that passengers should probably no longer have TV.

Three major airlines, American, United, and Alaska, are doing away
with seatback television monitors in favor of forcing passengers to
either bring their own devices or just twiddle their thumbs in their
tiny seats for a few hours. Or, I suppose, they could read a book if,
unlike me, they can train their eyes on a page in a cramped, moving
space without vomiting.

The reason, of course, is money. Those little screens apparently cost
$10,000 per seat, and studies show that they are not really an
important factor for consumers choosing their flights. But perhaps
that was because we assumed they would always be there.

And now, airlines will get to charge $30 for their ****ty wifi so you
can watch a movie you wouldn’t have paid $15 to see when it was in
theaters. Also, the beauty of those seatback TVs was that they did not
work without headphones. Now, there will most likely be a sharp
increase in full-volume sounds coming from dozens of screens in the
same cabin at the same time.

Of course, lack of television aboard an aircraft is a twenty-first
century inconvenience that is relatively minor when compared to the
travel-related suffering of yore. The word travel itself is derived
from the word travail, which means “painful or laborious effort.” Two
hundred years ago, there was a very real chance you would die of some
foreign sickness on your vacation if your boat didn’t sink on the
journey. But that’s not much consolation for the present-day when you
are stuck in a two-foot square with nowhere to put your arms using
tiny bottles of $10 booze to try and drown out the sound of your seat
neighbor watching Godzilla at top volume on an iPad.


I remember reading about how Skymall went out
of business because people are so glued to their
phones that no one was thumbing thru their goofy
catalogs any more.