The Expectation Business

Being in an airport drains the intelligence out of my body.

I’ll miss signs in front of my face. Misread tickets. I’ll stand in the wrong line. I’ve walked confidently in the wrong direction.

At first I thought it was just me. When I was younger I worked in a few fast food and high stress retail gigs. I was bad at them. My co-workers and managers thought I was an idiot. they were entirely right. I was an idiot in that specific environment.

Those jobs compressed my mind. Be on time. Follow the sequence. Don’t improvise. Don’t solve the problem your way. I assumed these jobs were easy because the tasks were simple. But that was the mistake. Simple tasks, repeated under pressure, with no room for judgment, can make (some) people dumber.

Airports do this to almost everyone.

Airports combine almost every condition that degrades judgment. They are a shopping mall crossed with a maximum-security prison. To get to your gate, you have to move through this labyrinth of consumerist choices, arbitrary rules, constant surveillance, bad lighting and strange signage. Miss your gate. Miss the flight. The result is that even competent people become procedural animals. They stop thinking.

Airlines understand this, so they charge money to escape the airport while still being inside it. They diminish your cognitive integrity and then sell it back to you.

I’m not much of a lounge person. I usually prefer finding an empty gate, ideally near the staff, to being packed into a generic room eating cafeteria food.

Once an airport diminishes your cognition, corporate food chains start sounding delicious.

In theory, airports should have incredible food. They are captive ecosystems filled with people who have money, time to kill, and nowhere else to go. It’s basically a small rich town.

Instead, you see massive lines at McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, Dunkin’, Pret, and Shake Shack. People are not looking for novelty in the airport. They are looking for one thing that will not surprise them.

That is why McDonald’s tastes so good at the airport. The food is mediocre but uou know exactly what it will taste like, and then it tastes that way. It just fulfills expectations.

The airport provides the clearest version of a rule that applies everywhere. Satisfaction is not the experience itself. It is the distance between what happened and what you expected to happen.

What Satisfaction Really Is

At a maximally luxurious resort, a slightly diluted coffee can ruin your mood. At a roadside Hampton Inn, that same coffee barely registers as bad. The physical reality is the same. The expectation is completely different.

This means every business is ultimately in the expectation business and every customer is really a bundle of assumptions before arriving at the door.

Most businesses manage expectation in three basic ways. The first type promises predictability. These are your standard corporate chains. McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Holiday Inn Express do not need to amaze you. Their product is predictability.

Other businesses promise something more. Luxury hotels, fine dining restaurants, raise expectations. They tell you the experience will be special. But this is risky because once the expectation is high enough, small failures become emotionally enormous.

Then there is the third type, the most fun to analyze, businesses that lower expectations on purpose. The customer arrives pre-disappointed. But anything short of disaster registered as success.

That was Spirit Airlines.

Spirit Airlines

Spirit Airlines shut down recently after collapsing into bankruptcy. It had been the butt of jokes for years, but it deserves a better obituary than “cheap chaotic airline failed.”

We forget how recent mass air travel is for many Americans. The old American vacation was not a flight to Paris or Tokyo. It was a long car ride somewhere. The road trip. Even in the mid-2000s, only about a quarter of Americans had passports. Then the great American flight boom happened. The economy got better. Instagram and social media made travel pics a status. Travel became an aspirational lifestyle.

Spirit helped contribute to that shift.

Travel expectations were different Spirit. Americans still believed an airline ticket came with a basic bundle that included a carry-on, a checked bag, a seat assignment, a tolerable level of service, and the dignity of being treated like a passenger rather than a unit of freight. Spirit broke that model.

It drove down the cost of the ticket aggressively. Now, the cheap fare buys transportation from A to B. Nothing more. Checked bag? Pay. Seat assignment? Pay. Carry-on? Pay. Flexibility? Pay. Comfort? Don’t be ridiculous. They cut on quality everywhere. And you knew it when you bought the ticket.

When you arrived at the airport in the morning, you were expecting a bad time. You were braced for it. You saw the videos and read the reviews.

@bradandkristi.show

I have never seen anything like this before. But wow. Crazy shit. They even called the cops. 😳 #spirit #spiritairlines #2weeksago #chic... See more

Chaos at check-in.

@taytoxindy

Part two!! Lpve the first cop that came! He was so calm! #spiritairlines #spiritairlineshorrorstory #airportsecurity #indianapolisairport

Someone yelling

@dailymail

Heated exchange between two Spirit Airline employees 😬

Yelling at you

@dailymail

Another day another Spirit Airlines freak out 🤦🏻‍♂️😂 🎥Kbomb/ViralHog #spirit #plane #flight #airport #meltdown #shouting #passangers

Most of the time, the worst did not happen. You landed. You left the airport. You felt relief. You told yourself you'd fly it again next time.

This is the genius of driving down expectations. Spirit did not have to be good. It only had to be less bad than the disaster you had already prepared yourself for.

And once Spirit proved Americans would accept this bargain, the rest of the industry copied the logic. The legacy carriers created basic economy, a polite, corporate version of the same psychological move. Once you buy a basic economy ticket you know how to calibrate your expectations.

@jetsetter_jake

Saved money by flying in basic economy but the boarding process had me sweating. Easy way to share travel costs. #americanairlines #united... See more

American Misery

The same thing happens at the level of a country.

A country is not just a place. It is an expectation system. It teaches people what they are allowed to expect from life, from institutions, and from the future.

This may explain why many Americans are not happy. America is not just a rich country. It is the country where things are supposed to work.

This matters because functionality is the premise of the American promise. If things work, you can move. Change jobs, change cities, change class, change your life. The American dream is not just wealth. It is self-reinvention. And self-reinvention requires a working infrastructure beneath your feet. So when things fail. It feels like a broken contract.

One the reasons why people living in poorer countries sometimes report being happier than Americans is this exact mechanism. Not because their lives are easier. They’re harder. They own less possessions.

It’s because their expectations are calibrated differently. Things work 70% of the time, but you expect 30%. In America, things work 60% of the time, and you expect 100%.

Expectations and Blame

When reality disappoints us, our mind asks two questions

1) Did I expect this? 

2) Who is responsible?

The answers to these questions change dramatically depending on the scale of the institution we are dealing with. Scale alters the geography of blame. Think of when you get angriest. Think of how Yelp reviews work.

At a small independently owned business or restaurant, bad service feels personal. The owner is visible. The place has a real identity. If you are treated badly, the failure feels more acute.

That is why small businesses can produce such intense anger. We approach them expecting decency, reciprocity, maybe even a little soul. We expect a human encounter. So when the encounter goes wrong, it feels like a betrayal and we angry.

Maybe. it’s because humans evolved in smaller communities, dealing with owner occupied places. Gigantic corporations and franchises are an extremely new thing. Try opening up a small business yourself and you’ll see it. People get mad.

A corporate chain is different. The same bad service is depersonalized. The cashier is following policy. The manager is understaffed. Corporate designed the broken app. The supply chain failed. The algorithm priced it strangely. Responsibility disperses across a machine too large to hate cleanly.

This is one of the hidden advantages of scale. Big institutions do not need to be loved. We already expect them to be cold, so their coldness does not shock us. It is folded into the baseline.

The Cynics vs the Stoics

Expectation is attachment pointed at the future. You expect something because you have attached your future wellbeing to an outcome.

The ancient question was how far you had to go to solve this problem.

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