Airline Industry and Inventory Pooling
For several years, I worked for a major supplier to the commercial airline industry. Eventually, I had to leave, because the entire industry just drove me nuts - some of the worst structural problems in any industry I have seen combined with an incredible unwillingness to do anything about them. Marginal Revolution reminds me about the airline industry with this post.
Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The extra weight caused airlines to spend $275 million to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000 just to carry the additional weight of Americans, the federal agency estimated in a recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (fee req'd).
As entertaining as this is, the industry is still totally unwilling to address the real problems in the industry.
