DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Southwest Airlines recently began enforcing a 22-year-old policy of charging obese passengers for a second seat, if they don’t fit into the single seat they purchased a ticket for. Here is the article I read: Southwest to make overweight buy 2 seats; Advocates for obese blast airline’s plan

The article contained a quote that I found especially pithy, for reasons I’ll explain in a bit. David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, said: “If you can’t sit in the seat with the arm rest down, then you are taking up more room than you should be. If passengers have supersized themselves and are encroaching on the space of others, fairness says you should be paying for the space.”

I am much enamored of Stempler’s use of the word “supersized,” both for its freshness — it can only have entered the common vocabulary recently, for it has only been a handful of years since McDonald’s began using the term to describe their XXL-size servings — and for its implication that one of the reasons people are obese is that they’ve overindulged in excessive portions of unhealthy foods, e.g. McDonald’s Super Size French Fries.

I am also fond of his use of “encroaching,” and I think everyone should begin using it immediately to describe that which is not First Class. That is, instead of Coach Class, we’ll call it Croach Class. I think “Croach Class” captures the essence of the discomfort that most airlines inflict on everyone on the wrong side of the privacy curtain.

Stempler’s argument appealed to me for reasons beyond linguistics. It seemed logical. But I have to admit my bias; in general I find it difficult to be sympathetic for obese people, because I believe that some of them — OK, maybe I’m naive, most of them — could do something about it. I might be completely wrong, though, so I’ll do what I always do when I don’t know the answer: I’ll look it up.

The Center for Disease Control summarizes the causes of obesity; paraphrasing, they are:

• Obese people eat too much.
• Obese people move too little.
• Obese people had obese parents.

The first two are within the obese person’s ability to change: eat less, move more. And while there are genetic factors involved, the third one sounds like a cop-out. If your genes dictate that your body stores fat in a certain way that makes you predisposed to obesity, then you will have a hard time losing weight, but nothing I’ve read in my research indicated that it’s impossible to lose weight by manipulating caloric i/o. I think that fad diets are, in most cases, misleading and dangerous, and I think that American society’s demand for instant gratification deters most people from becoming healthy. Still, people are not born obese, and for most adults it ought to be possible to not be obese, so far as I have read.

To the CDC’s list of three core causes for obesity, the Surgeon General adds one: they suggest that socioeconomic influences can contribute to obesity. I believe this is true… But on the other hand I also believe that most of the customers of Southwest Airlines can afford to eat less and move more.

(Moving more is a critical aspect of health — read Pete Egoscue for inspiration, especially if your body hurts.)

Anyway, biases aside, I still agreed with Stempler. I thought about it this way: when I go to the grocery store, I pay for the amount of food I buy. If someone else buys more food, they pay more; it’s not a flat-rate plan. If someone can’t fit into one seat on the airplane, then it’s logical that they should buy another one, or upgrade to a class of service that offers additional space if such a thing is available.

You might argue that Southwest was offering a flat-rate plan, because aside from the usual deals and discounts, every passenger paid the same amount regardless of body size, toddler to sumo. But the Southwest policy indicates that the flat-rate nature of the fee schedule was based on the premise that their one size of seat would be an adequate serving for all customers. This turns out not to be the case… and so it seems reasonable of them to charge more for passengers who demand more. If you order a second entree the next time you’re in a restaurant, they will charge you for it.

The counter-argument is that Southwest’s policy is discriminatory. The clearest comparison is with the disabled population: must airlines provide means for wheelchair-bound passengers to fly? Yes, according to the Americans with Disabilities Act. So, is Southwest discriminating against obese passengers by not providing plus-size seats? This is a tough question.

If Southwest charged extra money for wider seats, would they be discriminating against the wider passenger? If Southwest amortized the cost of a few wider seats over all the seats on the plane, are they discriminating against the narrow passengers by forcing them to subsidize the lucky few who are sitting comfortably? If Southwest reserved bigger seats for obese passengers, are they discriminating against non-obese people who would love to have the extra space, and might even be willing to pay more for them?

The ADA requires airlines to provide extra services for disabled passengers. I’m sure these services generate expenses which are not passed along to the disabled passenger. It’s reasonable to assume that all passengers share these expenses, that the expenses are built into the overhead of running the airline in compliance with the law. Should the same service be extended to obese passengers?

Southwest has posted a readable and entertaining FAQ on their seat-usage policy. I am unable to find any such clear statement from the opposition, although I imagine we’ll be hearing courtroom news on the subject before the year is out.