$20 Act of Kindness: How a Flight Attendant’s Gesture Changed a Life [Roundup]

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About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. “Tipping is so out of control even United’s mobile app now asks for one”

    I don’t get it. The link is talking about donating money to a sustainability fund. I don’t think that’s equivalent to “tipping”, although I wouldn’t do either (tip or donate to their sustainability fund).

  2. On the “Hamas” t-shirt, assuming that the whole thing was not made up or just someone wanting to spend a couple of hours getting grilled by the TSA, they forgot “Sucks”. Sounds awfully made up to me, like if someone had a “I Love Lockerbie” t-shirt.

  3. $20……20 YEARS ago…..uh ya, okay.
    More and more of these reddit posts are examples of creative writing by underemployed people for mythical reddit points (up votes). It simply didn’t happen. Not now, not 20 years ago. Never.

  4. Can’t make out the audio. Whatever the situation was with the Hamas t shirt, lets be clear that Hamas are scum and Netanyahu is scum. Let’s not support either. Support humanity and humane treatment of fellow human beings and especially those caught in the cross-fire of these and other monsters wreaking havoc in our world.

  5. Regarding the tipping issue: as a former restaurant lifer, I’ve always tipped servers and bartenders, as well as some hotel employees, pretty phat.

    But I do that out of my own volition. The proliferation of “tip screens” and such, is really annoying. I get that a lot of people don’t make a lot of money right now (myself included), but none of them are getting $2.12/hour like tipped employees. This is just another way for companies to squeeze consumers, and skimp on employee pay and benefits in order to “increase shareholder value”, which is the dirtiest sentence in the English language.

    As we all know, two Boeing planes crashed with all souls lost, simply because BA the company didn’t want to spend the extra money to insure their safety. Following the same logic, chronic understaffing and low wages, used for basically the same reason, lead to people asking for money.

    I ignore these asks. The former server in me always regrets it a little, but a point must be made: companies should PAY their employees, customers should NOT have to subsidize wages because the CFO of “insert company here” figured out a way to make top-line profits look better on quarterly calls.

    I realize that I may sound like a socialist to some of you (tough nuts, I am one), and it’s a convoluted train of thought to place two great tragedies together with what is overall a minor annoyance in one post, but the same holds true for both: when unchecked Wall Street greed runs the economy, we all suffer, some more than others.

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