Once again, and I certainly don't condone it, but that is a "5 dollars doesn't buy my undivided attention, Robert" dynamic. Underemployment is rampant in customer service, since we gave up the baby a long time ago to globalization. Now you have a highly economically stressed demographic, and a refusal for both industry and government to pay for retraining the domestic casualties of globalization in earnest (the German model comes to mind). Yet people want devotion and attention to detail from these modern day "shackles without physical shackles" american version of slaves? Nope, not gonna happen. Maslow may be BS to pilots, since many live-to-work as aspiring airline pilots and traveling workers getting paid in ILSs, but most of Americans don't live like that, so they won't smile and gaf for 35k/yr in metro airline hub usa because regional jets are neat-o, or potato.
As to flight attendants having contempt for their customers, same deal, and nothing new. Even nurses, who get paid much better in the aggregate, suffer from serious contempt for their job because what attracted them to the profession are essentially the wrong reasons (money without consideration for the nature of the job). My wife is currently doing her clinical rotations (one year to go, Lord I can't wait for her school to be over), and though she has committed instructors, many of the nursing staff she interacts with are cynical, contemptful towards their job and patients when in private, and some brazenly admit they entered it for the money and otherwise wish they'd get paid the same to sit around in an office, or hell who are we kidding, many are just searching for the next doctor victim to their hypergamous stay at home wife life goal. And I digress before the feminists get triggered.
At any rate, they might as well let the passengers volunteer to stew for discounted tickets to travel somewhere, because that's essentially how flight attendants view their job in private. Like my all-female cohort of townie coworkers at JCPenney back in grad school, pulling enough hours to qualify for the employee discount, because they're not doing it for the paltry hourly rate. See, when I did that job it was to save for my IR and Cpl while in grad school, but I knew every day of my life there that I didn't need the job, and that it was going to end, so giving AF and not taking it out on the customer was not an indignity for me. But for folks for whom this is as good as it gets? Absolutely I understand the crappy attitude. Again not condoning it, but I live in the world of what things are, not the world of how things should be. My opinion is we re gonna end up with basic income in 100 years or less, if global population trends continue unabated and the economy continues to automate.
Ask yourself why the proverbial emirates flight attendant experience is so pleasant and quaint, and domestics are outright hostile. The difference in the demographic and life dynamics of these two work groups working across the ocean holds the reason for the difference in outcome for the passenger. Don't shoot the messenger, just food for thought.
