Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

This past year I have flown a lot, I mean a lot. Over 115,000 payed miles one United alone, 3 free flights on United, and a couple random flights on Northwest and Hawaiian. All in all about 150,000 miles spent in the air. And the year isn’t over yet!

During that year in the air there have been a lot of changes to the industry due to every single airline except Southwest loosing money because of high fuel prices. Airlines are going out of business. Airlines are charging for baggage. Most airlines have done away with free food, although that was mostly last year, this year a lot of airlines have cut out the free bag of mixed pretzel things. And, although I’m not sure on other airlines, United has cutout Champagne in first class.

On top of all these changes, routes are getting cut to reduce capacity which means crowded flights full of extremely grumpy people and long standby lists.

While these changes might be necessary to cut costs and stay in business I for one think they were poorly implemented, but that’s another story. What this article is about is why airlines aren’t doing more to produce more revenue rather than cutting costs?

Why aren’t they selling me things in the air?

First, accept credit cards, you have the persons name with more security than any other place on earth, its not a security thing, figure out how to do it. Hawaiian only accepts credit card by the way….

Next, why not sell better snack selections? I as recently on a flight that instead of $6 snack packs they sold huge pringles stacks and trail mix for $3. How about a candy bar, healthy snacks, better food choices?

Next, why not get rid of some storage that weighs 200 pounds, gotta be able to cut that out of something, and bring on board 50 personal video players all loaded with 20 movies each, charge $10 per flight to rent them.

How about you sell headphones, noise canceling. Offer for people to try some on the plane, accept credit cards, then sell them a pair.

How about other things to rent? (and that doesn’t mean pillows and blankets, what a dumb idea that was whichever airline it was)

Best idea of all to sell to this captive audience….. Don’t know yet, but be innovative, think of something, and make more revenue. Don’t cut costs to make your service worse.

I writer this while I sit on the runway waiting for our gate to open.

From time to time I’ve discussed on this blog managing multiple writers for my blog network, Blogtown Press. Mainly I’ve dealt with the odds and ends of finding, organizing, and paying bloggers to writer on one or many of my various blogs. Those articles are helpful but they haven’t really given tips on helping with the task of managing these writers through Wordpress.

Managing writers, even with wordpress can be a big task. While there are plugins that help you it’s always tough to sort through them all and find the plugins that help you the most. Well, I recently began to rekindle my interest with the internet, blogging, and building a business by paying freelance writers to build content and thought I’d begin to share some tips with my readers about how this process is going.

I’ll jump into the business side of things more a little later (recently I created an LLC for one of my blogs and hope to expand that blog into a full business with possible full-time employees.) But first let me pass along some information on a plugin I happened across. The plugin is Role Manager which allows you to set specific rules for the roles inherent in Wordpress and change how they act. While the codex for role management does a little bit to help you understand the roles capability, it doesn’t really give you full control over what these various roles can do. They’re predefined.

Well the Role Manager plugin lets you change that by providing an interface to manage the inherent roles. Also, which is probably the best part of the plugin, is that it allows you to create new roles and set options for them. For example, let’s say you have most of your writers setup as contributors but you want one of them to have the added ability to upload files, like images. You don’t want to give everyone the chance to upload files, because you might not trust everyone as much as this person to upload non-malicious files, so what do you do?

You can create a new role and set it to a contributor upload role, or whatever name you choose obviously. You can then have everything the same as the settings for a contributor but the new role will allow this special subset of contributors to upload files.

This is just one example but you can see how this wordpress plugin allows you to customize and better manage your writers and members of your wordpress site to be able to have more features than the defaults. This allows you, as an employer of freelance writers to give your writers more options without giving away all the accessibility of say, an Editor.

Why the question mark you might ask. Because if you’ve traveled on an airline lately you’ll know that most people aren’t happy. The workers or the travelers. This is something that I’ve come to know too well. Traveling for work (my 9-5) I’ve gained 1K status on United Airlines. For those of you that don’t know that’s flying 100,000 miles in one calendar year. And I made it in the first week of October.

For some this may seem cool or great, traveling for work, going to different places and I must admit, at the beginning of the year I thought is was too. But 3 months into it I was over it and now after a solid year of traveling at the rate up almost 2 weeks a month I’m getting over it. I live in Hawaii with my wonderful wife, and enjoy playing outdoors.

To top it off, all of my flights are at least 6 hours long!

That’s why I was surprised and relieved when I took part of my last trip and it seemed as though the airlines were full of joy? Every work was kind and approached me with a smile, the plane staff was extremely friendly, behind the counter, same thing! And better yet, on both of my flights I received a pilot card with a little note written on it thanking me for being an elite member. Both legs!

Now the pilot cards are nothing new, every once in a while the stewardess’ will hand them out. But two in one day, plus the happy flight staff, unreal? Maybe there was a company wide meeting at United saying we have to actually care about the people that pay our salaries. I’m not sure. But whatever it is it was great to fly with them.

I just hope it wasn’t a fluke and these people are nice all the time.

By the way, the flight was LAX to IAD and IAD to MIA.

A while back it was suggested to me to read a book about economics. While I never took economics in college, and really only heard horror stories (except from the guy who suggested the book to me) I was interested in the economy, money, and reading. So I thought I’d give it a shot.

The book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, was an amazing book and not really all that much about economics at all. Rather it is a book about using fundamentals in economics and other sciences to look at various social issues from several different point’s of view.

What I mean by this is that the author, Steven Levitt, looks at an issue plaguing the world using different questions. Sometimes questions that might cause controversy, but when one digs deeper, the questions he asks seem to make more sense than possibly those questions raised to provides answers in the first place.

Take for instance his possibly controversial reason for a drop in crime rates. At first it may seem like the drop in crime rates can be tied to social programs aimed at reforming criminals. Obviously, certain politicians would support this stance given that it is usually government money providing such support programs. This support usually comes in the form of reports on how well the government money is doing reforming criminals exemplified by the drop in crime rates.

However, Levitt takes a different aim at the reason behind the drop. In Freakonomics he states that it’s not necessarily these programs or gun laws or any other government interaction with groups more prone to criminal acts, instead he looks towards Roe v. Wade which allowed abortions to those who would otherwise have brought children into this world that were more likely to resort to criminal acts. Crazy? At first you may think this guy is nuts, but really look into it. Look into how well the dates of Roe v. Wade and criminal acts drops overtime. It becomes very intriguing.

Of course this is just one of the examples from his book. He talks about gangs, gun control, and even the KKK. All of these controversial topics he analyzes not to spew his own political rhetoric on the general public, but rather, he brings up these topics to try and encourage everyone to look at these topics differently and not just how the media or government or even the scientific community looks at them and reports to you.

In a time where every place you turn you hear of a new report claiming to have solved some new social mystery and prove that this new opinion is the right one, Levitt offers a breath of fresh air. He challenges readers to try and ask more than just the question of norm and really look beyond forest to see the trees.

Check out his book Freakonomics