You Are Not Free to Move About the Country

It's a small thing, but Southwest Airlines' announcement to start charging for luggage really points to bigger issues in the U.S.

Discovering Southwest Airlines in the 1990s felt like a revelation. My prior experience with airlines had largely been that they were expensive, dreary, and dominated by byzantine policies meant to immiserate the customer. By contrast, Southwest was charmingly cheap and cheerful -- those plastic boarding passes! The personality-packed flight attendants! And you could stare at the cocktail napkins and trace all the routes that had suddenly opened up to you at a reasonable cost. I was a recent West Coast transplant and I used that airport to explore cities I had only read about -- Tucson, Seattle, San Diego, Denver, Austin, Los Angeles -- and to bounce back regularly to upstate New York, DC, or Chicago for family weddings and other visits. As I moved further into adult life, Southwest was the airline of choice for family vacations, especially once they began flying to Hawaii.

Until very recently, I felt good about flying Southwest. The customer service had been consistently responsive, the experience on flights consistently adequate. With Virgin America no longer a going concern -- it was merged into Alaska Airlines in 2018 -- and Jet Blue scaling back its Bay Area routes, Southwest was the last cheap-and-cheerful airline standing for those of us who like flying out of Oakland.

Southwest was targeted by the activist investor Elliott Investment Management, the old-school management has been besieged, and now the hedge fund capitalists are doing what they do best -- demanding a rise in short-term revenue streams while squandering long-term reputation or growth. And one of the first things these folks have done is decide that the era of two free checked bags is over.

SO WHAT?

It's a small thing but it points to bigger things, the relentless and unchecked shittification of American life among them. Even prior to the bag-fee news, Southwest had gradually whittled away its cheap and cheerful egalitarianism. Fares are tiered -- you don't have the option to cancel or change flights unless you pay more for the privilege of flexibility -- and even the cattle-call boarding is now pay to play.

Perhaps we are all in limbo and this is a sign we need to work harder to move on to a better place.

Now, Southwest will be ending free checked bags in May 2025 unless and until you're part of their top tier of fliers. You become their top tier by being the kind of person who pays more per flight or who can afford to fly a lot. It's another example of what NYT reporter Nelson D. Schwartz called the Velvet Rope Economy. The most trenchant quote from the book of the same name sums up the experience of living in today's America, the numerous and incremental special privileges one now has to pay for to participate in everything from getting a coffee to going to Disneyland:

It sounds like an innovative answer to the problem that everybody faces at an amusement park, and one perfectly in keeping with the approaches currently in place at airports and even on some crowded American highways—perfectly in keeping with the two-tiering of America. You can pay for one level of access, or you can pay for another. If you have the means, you can even pay for freedom.

There’s only one problem: Cutting the line is cheating, and everyone knows it. Children know it most acutely, know it in their bones, and so when they’ve been waiting on a line for a half-hour and a family sporting yellow plastic Flash Passes on their wrists walks up and steps in front of them, they can’t help asking why that family has been permitted the privilege of perpetrating what looks like an obvious injustice. And then you have to explain not just that they paid for it but that you haven’t paid enough—that the $100 or so that you’ve ponied up was just enough to teach your children that they are second- or third-class citizens.

(Emphasis mine.)

WHO CARES?

Southwest used to have the advertising slogan "You are now free to move about the country," and it so nicely encapsulated the sense of potential that affordable air travel engendered. Travel encompasses many things but among them is a sense of expansive possibility. When you travel, whole new frontiers open up before you, each one of them holding the promise that a new sight, spectacle, experience or observation will enrich and enlarge your understanding of the world and yourself. By traveling, you had opportunities, both internal and external, to discover and pursue happiness.

Admit it, when you learned about the Underground Railroad as a child, this is what you imagined.

Cheap train fares opened up America to dreamers and doers in the 1800s but because we never treated trains as public utilities necessary for nation-building, the mighty railway networks that crisscrossed this country were permitted to fall on rough times during the last Gilded Age, and they were not in a position to lobby against the rise of mass-marketed private transit, i.e. the automobile.

It's not hard to see a parallel now; the financial shakeout of budget airlines is another instance of the U.S. losing the kind of mass transit options that opened up the country to anyone who wanted to see it. (And culturally, Americans still don't have a conception of public transit as a utility -- we treat it as a vector for racist and classist discrimination.)

Losing the free bag on a Southwest flight is another reminder that the people who make big money in this country are aggressively sifting us into haves and have-nots because it's profitable for them and they don't have to care about anyone below an elite class of high-end consumers. Fun fact -- did you know that "the wealthiest 10% of American households—those making more than $250,000 a year, roughly—are now responsible for half of all US consumer spending and at least a third of the country’s gross domestic product." That 10% is all that matters.

Look, it’s the people who can still afford imported liquor, cigars and top hats.

This catering to the 10% while forcing unceasing enshittification on the other 90% is chipping away at any expansive sense of opportunity, and eroding any sense of communal identity. We are not as free to move about the country, in several meaningful ways. We are going to have to pay more and more for less and less until we voluntarily conclude opportunity is completely unaffordable to us in the U.S.

TALES FROM THE "NO ETHICAL CONSUMPTION UNDER CAPITALISM" DEPARTMENT

If you follow me on Bluesky, you know that I share sales numbers and foot traffic statistics about how Target is doing in the face of a Black church-led boycott. Here's how it's going for them:

Answer:

I'm happy to boycott the company that was fine positioning itself as Walmart, But For Snobby Lifestyle Liberals until they deemed it profitable to drop the mask like a Scooby Doo villain, but I will cop to feeling mildly inconvenienced during Easter Basket season.

I may hit up World Market and its alluring assortment of international candies, provided they don't have palm oil, as we've been boycotting that for nearly ten years now courtesy of my daughter and her love of rainforest habitats, and provided they are not made by a Nestle company because we've been boycotting those since forever.

So I'm taking suggestions. What are you doing for your loved ones' Easter baskets this year? Hit reply and tell me.

YOUR POP CULTURE RECOMMENDATION

So this is the time of year where I am busiest at work and busiest with Girl Scout volunteering, and thus my pop culture has largely been restrained to sitting on the couch bonding with my kid over the activity known as "My 8th grade daughter explains Outer Banks to me."

If people on this show cover their torsos, they suffocate. I guess that’s where the gills are located.

And I have to say, if you are also experiencing a time of trial, watching something that combines the aesthetics of a 1990s J. Crew catalog shoot with the batshit sensibilities of early Riverdale seasons is just … 🤌. Literally no brain cells will be harmed in the viewing of this Netflix show.