United is a bad, evil company, and it deserves all the shit in the world. Literally: If all of the shit could be put into a some sort of box, or compressed into a diamond-tight shit-delivery parcel and then delivered to United’s corporate headquarters, and then decompressed such that those headquarters were covered in all of the world’s shit, it would be a morally just equivalence for the way it treats its passengers.
This transcends the footage that went viral yesterday of United bloodying and then removing a man who had purchased a ticket on a flight because a computer randomly selected him for that honor, such that United employees could enjoy a free flight. It is a company that refused entry to three young women because they were wearing leggings; a company that unapologetically kicked an autistic child off a flight; a company so ineptly run that its CEO was forced resign following a favor-trading scandal; a company that refused to give a Muslim woman an unopened can of Diet Coke even though the man next to her got an unopened can of beer; a company that as recently as last year created a task force designed to figure out why they sucked so fucking bad, a task at which they failed, apparently, because just look at how their new fucking CEO responded to yesterday’s outrage:
This came hot on the heels of a United spokesperson’s statement that, “After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate. We apologize for the overbook situation.”
Accordingly, the entire world—that is, what is visible on Twitter, but also on Chinese equivalent Weibo—has “volunteered” United to go fuck itself, or at least to help the corporation “re-accommodate” itself slightly closer to Satan’s anus, where it belongs. As is quickly becoming tradition, Merriam-Webster politely reminded the world how actual words work:
“Re-accommodate,” meanwhile, is defined by the dictionary as “to accommodate again,” something that United decidedly did not do. The CEO’s revealingly anti-human turn of phrase were criticized far and wide, generally using pop culture iconography:
There are a lot more. A lot of this outrage was pinned on the CEO’s inimitable PR doublespeak non-apology, which makes sense given that the actual footage that inspired the outrage is the raw, stomach-churning face of corporate machinery operating at the expensive of the very literal human bodies caught in its maw, and thus not exactly fit for hilarious online remixing. Still, if you didn’t already hate the company, it’s hard to look at voluntarily giving it money again the same way.
All of which is to say: Southwest is pretty nice, huh?