Just a few years ago I could make a day hop from the Valley to Colo, but not any longer. I went out to the airport at 8am for a 9:30 flight. It being a sunny cloudless day here and in Denver the flight is delayed. It’s probably cloudy, or windy or just crowded somewhere. It always is, somewhere.

My flight is delayed. Take off is listed as 11:40, which means airport lunch. Unfortunately the airlines isn’t a service business with awareness of a consumer. They are in the shipping business moving containers from warehouse to warehouse. Blocks across the grid.

A service orientation approach would take the opportunity to channel my thinking away from how long, how boring, how bad this experience is. A company with a customer focus could do something such as pass out $5 coupons for redemption at the airport. Properly structured, these coupons wouldn’t cost the airlines the full $5, and would mean I was having a coffee or chicken salad instead of thinking of the pain caused by United’s hatred of people.

I know, United doesn’t hate people, they’re just afraid of them. The airlines have gotten into a business they can’t solve. Customer service is much harder than hauling freight.

“At particular times a great deal of stupid people have a great deal of stupid money. . . At intervals. . . the money of these people – the blind capital, as we call it, of the country – is particularly large and craving; it seeks for someone to devour it, and there is a ‘plethora’; it finds someone, and there is ‘speculation’; it is devoured, and there is ‘panic’.” Walter Bagehot.

It seems like only yesterday …. the capitatarriots of CNBC were making snide aside astride the news from Europe + France. You know, the country we all hate. That news about the central banks coming in to the fog of capitalism, not with a light nor a horn but with, well, capital. Today the king of our own Fed, Bernanke, learns French and pledges bucks for the young over bred bulls of wall street. If their overfeeding didn’t stop they would soon be called Well Street, and we all fall down. Instead a sip of Pernod and nod of the chapeau to le Pew and the smell from our own stock yard. If you don’t know how you got here, you haven’t traveled far. Wall street still sits upon the decaying shits of long dead cattle. Bonjour le Pew, bonjour sweet smell.