How The Six Foot Economy Impacts Airlines, And How It Impacts You
Delta CEO Ed Bastian suggests it might take three years for travel to resume to pre-pandemic levels. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported that in order to just break even on the cost of operating a flight with no middle seats booked, airlines would have to raise ticket prices by 43 to 54 percent from their 2019 pricing. And the Six Foot Economy almost obliges further cutbacks in seating on airlines, shifting from four occupied seats to two per row.
In a year where models regularly conflict with one another, those three assessments may have no intersection at all. Bastian’s projection may not factor the steep price hikes from the IATA. The IATA does not factor in further distancing requirements. All three evaluate the consumer’s desire to engage in pre-COVID behavior while trying to address the shifting guidelines from policy and medical authorities. And everyone is operating without a decent exemplar case to use as a baseline.
How do people return to flying if they think the virus is sure to get them on planes? How can planes feel safe when workers are masked, look afraid, and when social distancing looks a lot like hiding?
The company I lead is a payment processor that works in certain areas of the economy and strives to have a positive impact on merchants, giving me a lens into the economy which I share with you here. While taking debit or credit cards isn’t the same as driving policy discussions, my sales outreach gives an interesting look at the challenges merchants face. By extension, it’s a look at how people think, shared in the context of a changing economy.
Over the ten weeks since lockdowns started in the United States, I’ve noticed a shift in attitude. The Wall Street Journal’s piece on the Red-Blue divide to feelings about COVID is absolutely something I hear, though the personal sentiment of nearly everyone I talk to is fear of the virus. With no organized information and a deluge of alarming headlines and stories, I start to see a timeline for that exemplar case. It takes about ten days to terrify enough of the population that they’ll hide.
Some of the clickbait which has dominated the media:
‘12 days of the worst illness I have ever experienced’ — A COVID-19 survivor’s story
Mississippi 16-year-old who recovered from COVID-19: ‘I wouldn’t wish that pain on my worst enemy’
Coronavirus Diaries: I Had the Coronavirus. This Was the Worst Part.
For Homeless People, Covid-19 Is Horror on Top of Horror
Five years ago, the BBC wrote an article about clickbait in news and how it was changing the face of online journalism. Since in 2020 all journalism is online, clickbait headlines have become the journalistic standard, and clickbait doesn’t lend itself to rational thought or positive emotion.
My customers and my industry are dealing with the COVID panic in different ways. Nearly all are looking for ways to help their family, help their employees, and help their community. It’s heartwarming to see, and to help them do so. Nearly all are grappling with fear in every business decision and every personal decision. And that’s draining.
My technique for feeling better may not be yours: I explore nature on my motorcycle. However you take time, I hope you take enough to keep safe and keep a positive outlook.
About Dana Love: Dana is currently the CEO and a founder of Radpay, a Phoenix-based startup payment provider for e-commerce merchants that optimizes direct connections to multiple banks resulting in significantly lower rates. Radpay does this with a patent-pending merchant card payment solution: more than five dozen inventions that blend distributed ledger technology with PCI-compliant card payment infrastructure and mobile devices to merge convenience, security, and transparency. Based on Ethereum, Radpay is a blockchain-based peer-to-peer payment processing and reward framework, where peers may be merchants, consumers, banks, or enterprises. Dana holds a PhD in economics (The University of Glasgow, highest honors), an MBA in marketing (Harvard Business School, Baker Scholar), and a BS in physics (University of Richmond, Phi Beta Kappa). The founder of five businesses with four successful exits, including Cisco Investments-backed Metacloud and Warburg Pincus-backed Radnet, Dana has led divisions of public companies including GTE (now Verizon), Prosodie Interactive (now CapGemini) and ADC. Notable successes include building the first cloud-based ERP system (in the mid-90s), development of the first carrier-grade VoIP and unified communications platforms in the world (at GTE, now Verizon), and early work in big data systems (as an Oracle partner.) His work in big data, machine learning, blockchain, and VoIP has been written about in Wired, Oracle’s Profit Magazine, the Financial Times, and Telephony Magazine.
