Cocktail picks are those plastic or wooden sticks that you use to place a lime or lemon in a glass for a cocktail. If you have a nice bar at home, your reusable ones might be stainless steel. Wooden ones retail at Amazon, $6.99 for 300 with free Prime shipping.
United Airlines is eliminating them in a perfect Kirby-era cut, saving a projected $80,000 per year. Presumably no one could demonstrate these influence passenger sales.
United will remove the cocktail picks used for lemons and limes onboard, which it notes will result in $80,000 annual savings.
Flight attendants use these to “pick” a lemon or lime wedge from a container and add it to your beverage. The addition of lemon or lime wedges was always available upon request, though some flight attendants would proactively offer them if you ordered a drink like sparkling water.
Bob Crandall, known for removing an olive from first class salads to save $40,000, claims to have replaced warehouse security with a recording of a barking dog.
None of this, though, comes close to ex-United CEO Jeff Smisek’s Newspeak-inspired ‘Project Quality’ to shave $2 billion in expense from his airline of course.
Didn’t we, the taxpayers, just give them a huge windfall? (Oh wait, that wasn’t me, it was my kids and grandkids who will pay for it. Yay!)
Anything for the almighty dollar… Tens of thousands in this case… all while putting their grubby hands in the billion dollar bin.
$1000 to buy the picks and $79,000 for the executive pick manager
“Flight attendants use these to “pick” a lemon or lime wedge from a container and add it to your beverage.” – Curious what they are going to use now. Fingers are re-usable…..and free.
Meanwhile on DL they just eliminated the cocktails themselves. For our safety of course. Beer and wine = SAFE. Cocktails = DANGER DANGER. Any plans on a blog post to call out DL for using the pandemic as an excuse to save $$$ ?
Well, just think of the all money they’ll spend explaining this to customers and printing up virtue signal posters of baby seals on icebergs with cocktail sticks wedged into them. I can see the FA’s bringing me a cocktail while stirring it with their finger 🙂
Is this really something to complain about? All you do is complain, as do the other people so far here. Really NBD.
United Rising
United Breaks Guitars
United Drags passengers down the aisle
Seems more like they are looking to nickel and dime as much as possible. So now are the FAs handling the lemon/lime with their hands or are they just getting rid of lemon and limes all together?During a pandemic the less a FA touches my food/drink the better.
When United Airlines eliminates toilet paper from all aircraft lavatories, their C-level executives should be able to receive another $250,000 profit-sharing bonus due to their airline cost reduction efforts.
If you guys don’t know what happens at 37,000 feet… shut up and move on. All they are doing is getting rid of the pokie sticks, they will still have stir sticks to stir a drink. There are no lines and lemons right now, so why have these sticks?
what’s the world coming to, airlines are a luxury of travel for ordinary people, the bottom echelon, who gives a shit about a contaminated toothpick
$80k? Please! They are often times spending $80k a day out of SFO on the 787 fleet for 100% extra pay for a 4 man crew to fly a 5-7 day cargo trip. On average one trip with 4 pilots all on 100% add pay trips is costing the company roughly $30k per trip. So 2-3 trips in one day that need the add pay to cover a trip blows this $80k out the window!
@LarryOlsen. When flying United Airlines, I believe even ordinary people care about contaminated toothpicks. For example, flight attendants with diminished hearing due to old age or cerumen impaction may use a toothpick to remove their earwax. When serving you a beverage, if they forget to use a clean toothpick after picking at their earwax or nose, this is not the best airline hygienic practice before picking up a lemon wedge.
Cerumen is defined as a mixture of secretions (sebum with secretions from modified apocrine sweat glands) and sloughed epithelial cells. It is an ordinary substance present in the external auditory canal. As cerumen migrates laterally, it may mix with hair and other particulate matter.
Cerumen impaction is an accumulation of cerumen that causes symptoms or prevents a needed assessment of the ear canal, tympanic membrane, or audiovestibular system, or both.
When flight attendants ignore passenger customer service requests for a refill of their adult beverage, this may be due to cerumen impaction instead of poor passenger customer service. As always but especially during the Holiday season, please be kind to the entire flight crew.
As long as United doest get rid of most of their mechanics and be like Southworst who has never had one 3,000 mechanics while pre China Virus the big 3 all had about 10k each with close to the same amount of aircraft that Southworst maintains.