Today JetBlue said that it will start charging $7 for a pillow and blanket. You get to keep the pillow and blanket, and ostensibly both are clean—marketed, in fact, as “The World’s Cleanest(tm) travel pillow and blanket kit”—but still, this is very sad. Makes me nostalgic for a time I never knew, when air travel was elegant, when we didn’t pay extra for food and checked bags and extra leg room and reserving a seat ahead of time. US Airways will likely be the next to charge for a pillow-and-blanket set (by the end of the year, it seems), which indicates there’s no stopping this strategy of completely fractionalizing the airplane experience instead of just, you know, raising prices. When JetBlue sells you your $7 pillow-and-blanket set, they’ll also give you a $5 coupon to Bed Bath & Beyond. That makes me even sadder.
To make myself feel better, I reread David Owen’s Shouts & Murmurs column in the New Yorker from a few weeks ago. It’s called “My Airline.” I recommend reading the entire thing, but if you can’t manage a hyperlink, here’s an excerpt:
Laughing out loud at anything in any movie, whether it is playing on the cabin system or on your own DVD player, is fifty dollars per incident. Asking me to turn off my reading light so that you can see the screen better: also fifty dollars.
If you and your spouse are dressed almost identically, or if you are carrying your passport in a thing around your neck, or if you are wearing any form of footwear or pants that you clearly purchased specifically to wear on airplanes, or if you make it obvious (by repeatedly turning around and talking to passengers in seats not adjacent to yours) that you are travelling with a group, the charge is fifty dollars.
Funny. At least for now.
Barbara!