News and notes from around the interweb:

• National Car Rental is back with what’s the most lucrative rental car promotion each year, One Two Free offering a free rental day for each rental of two or more days through January. Sadly no one cares about rental cars so I’m giving this just a one line mention.

• Back in June Citibank sued AT&T for trademark infringement over use of the word ‘Thanks’. Citi had its request for an injunction against AT&T’s use of the term denied and then the lawsuit was withdrawn with prejudice (HT: @UTFOZZIE)

• Whoops. You do have to be a Costco member to have a Citi Costco card, but… (HT: Alan H.)

  On Friday evening, a number of Costco members received emails from Citi, the issuer of the new Visa-Costco credit card, alerting them that their credit card accounts had been closed.

  In at least some cases, members reported that they received emails addressed to other people that contained the last four digits of other users’ account numbers, raising concerns that their accounts had been hacked.

  Citi told Business Insider that Friday’s emails were intended to be sent to Costco shoppers whose memberships had lapsed to alert them they could no longer use their Costco Anywhere Visa cards. But because of a systematic error, some active Costco members received emails intended for other cardholders.

  
  Copyright jetcityimage / 123RF Stock Photo

• If you want to buy SriLankan Airlines your deadline to express interest has been pushed back to the end of the month

• TSA detained 9 year old boy over pacemaker

• Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport will let you buy toy Kalashnikovs. Meanwhile the TSA will confiscate stuffed animals with two inch plastic toy guns.
  

• Long tail: The Economist cites this three year old post of mine on why US airline service lags that of Asian carriers.

  Unions are handy for employees fighting for decent pay and job stability, but tend not to be not so good for passengers. As Gary Leff writes in his View From the Wing blog, “As long as scheduling is done by seniority, and pay is doled out by route, and as long as commendations and criticisms are only ancillary to performance evaluations, pay, and perks, airlines aren’t going to be able to align the incentives of their frontline workforce to deliver outstanding service.”

  I’m on record many times suggesting that unions aren’t per se the problem but rather the way management negotiates its contracts with unions. Southwest and Alaska have friendlier flight attendants and unions, Delta’s flight attendants aren’t on the whole better than Southwest’s and Alaska’s. But reducing rigidity in work and compensation rules, union or not, necessary if you want to change a service culture.