Reblogging the Past

Having chosen to maintain just one blog here at johnfulwider.com instead of three (this one, ThesisBlog and Fulwider's Food & Travel), I'm worried posts from the latter two BlogSpot-hosted might disappear in a Blogger server move or suffer some other misfortune. So I've moved ThesisBlog to my server and will soon do the same with Fulwider's Food & Travel.

I'm also "reblogging" some greatest hits from those two old blogs. Readers across the globe (all three of them) voted by telephone and SMS in a hard-fought popularity contest that saw the announced margin of victory change just two times. To soothe those whose thumbs remain sore from frantic Texas-style "vote early, vote often" balloting, I'm posting the greatest hits in reverse chronological order instead of by popularity. Here's the first one.

Airlines are on the right track testing whether customers will pay for in-flight food.
Delta is the latest to try this concept, following America West and Northwest. The airlines should have done this long ago. Long gone are the days when air travel was a luxury, and passengers dressed in their Sunday best. Airplanes are flying buses. But they do make much longer trips, so some concession to the traveling public's collective growling stomach is necessary. One hopes they can turn a profit off their overpriced "Mrs. Fields cookies, Entenmann's cinnamon rolls and Pizzeria Uno sandwiches" and funnel the money into smoothing out their fare structures into something like Southwest's excellent $299 maximum one-way fare.

There's a drawback, though, to eliminating or sharply cutting back full meals on airlines: Less material for the hilarious AirlineMeals.net, the global repository of photographic proof that airline meals stink.
(Reblogged from February 5, 2003.)