Word: travels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Travel six miles up a dirt road in Oklahoma's Ozarks and you will reach a 400-acre, semi-religious encampment called Elohim City. There you will find a vine-covered structure roofed over with polyurethane foam, looking oddly like the cottage in the tale of Hansel and Gretel. This is the Worship House. Within it Elohim's spiritual father, Robert Millar, 71, preaches a mix of Christian Scripture and heterodox tales of Germanic, Celtic and Scandinavian tribes--the true Israelites who will provide God's terrible soldiers at Armageddon. Lately, though, the elfin, white-bearded patriarch of the Christian...
...condition they rather like. The profits are rolling in now because of a gritty, singleminded and profoundly painful campaign of cost cutting over the past five years, in which airlines have done everything from "outsourcing" (i.e., contracting out to other firms) plane cleaning and baggage handling, to whacking travel agents' commissions, to laying off ticket agents, middle managers and mechanics, to shrinking passenger seats and eliminating meals...
Labor remains the single largest controllable cost for an airline. And while the labor situation seems to wax touchier and more problematic each day, airlines are also turning to more empirical ways to save money. These include setting up ticket "distribution channels" that bypass travel agents. By selling directly to consumers, they avoid commissions. Many have implemented ticketless travel, and some are offering discounted weekend and other specialty fares on the Internet...
Blame it on deregulation. The free-for-all in the skies that began in 1978 democratized travel and lowered fares--that's the good part. The bad part is that the industry has become a commodity business that serves millions of passengers a year but treats them like pork bellies. "Service appears to be declining over time," says Steven Casley, principal at Back Associates, an aviation consultancy in Stamford, Connecticut. "What's driving that is deregulation: cost cutting, fewer employees, fewer amenities and fewer services...
...Food. It's a toss-up (oops, wrong word) whether getting a meal is good or bad--but now even cross-country travelers can find themselves going hungry. First the airlines removed the flavor from chicken a la king, then they jettisoned the chicken altogether. Between 1992 and 1995 the airlines shaved $368 million off costs by cutting meal service, according to the Airport Transport Association. A few years ago, American found that removing a single olive per salad could save $100,000. "My wife and I bring our own food on board," says Martin Deutsch, editor at large...