American Airlines saved $40.000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class 🫒
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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And thus, the race to cut as much quality as possible while retaining a minimum viable product was begun!
Just think how much they saved when they cut the whole meal.
And their CEO was mocked for it.
American Airlines pulled a single olive from food in first class and saved $40,000 a year! Surely these guys are cutting right to the bone? American’s stunt saved almost nothing. At the time, it was around the salary of two experienced Captains among the hundreds in the entire fleet, or the complete cost, including opportunity cost, of a single ground-inspection on the 727 airliner.
It was nothing and yet it reduced his airline’s quality to the only people it should have never cut quality to, the first-class flyers. These people aren’t price sensitive, but they are brand-sensitive. American was mocked mercilessly by rival airlines.
“hey! i remember there being 5 olives in this salad last year!”
1993, Delta saves $1.3mm by removing lettuce as a garnish https://www.chicagotribune.com/1993/02/28/to-delta-thats-a-lot-of-lettuce/
Profit is in the pickles
I have a large pharmaceutical customer that spends almost a million a year on box cutters. It’s the craziest stuff.
For all you confused Americans out there (myself included lol): Some countries use the decimal where we use a comma, and where we use a decimal they use a comma. So in American English this would be “$40,000,” not “$40.”
You’ll see it a lot in European languages where they list prices as €6,50 instead of €6.50 for example or even 6,5€. They’ll list bigger numbers as 40.000 instead of 40,000
Just looking at their revenue for that year ($19.9M) that means they retained 0.2% more of their annual revenue, which definitely seems a lot for a single olive. That said, given the value perception of first class has shifted so dramatically from US dominated to Middle East or Asia leading the way, there’s an argument it was short term thinking.
I can’t remember when the US government eliminated the pennies on all their cheques (checks in the US). So all recipients are losing 1 -99 cents every cheque. That alone is saving them millions every year.
$40?
That sounds a lot like predicted savings that got the beancounters some attaboys, but never fully materialized. I’d think $40k would be an airline’s entire olive budget back in 1987.
Several airlines saved millions in fuel costs by not painting their planes. I guess a few microns of paint on a 747 adds a decent amount of weight.
Imagine how much they can save just starving passengers instead
And then someone straight out of Harvard business school with and MBA on $200,000 a year thought “ hey, what if we got rid of another olive” and he was given a promotion.
All the airlines in America don’t even serve hot meals anymore, just a bag of nuts if your lucky. In Asia, even a one-hour flight gets hot meals. Greedy mofos.
I can tell you’re probably German or some other European because in English you use commas to separate digits in whole numbers not periods.
The ideas guy who hatched the genius plan gets paid 120 000 in expenses alone.
IKR when I flew back from Singapore, they cut me off after I’d had 16 glasses of Red Wine.
When I got to Heathrow, I could even still find my bus… eventually… without having to have a sleep in the airport first.
All because some rich people couldn’t make do with less olives in the ’80s.
Were olives the avocado of 1987 or something?
I’m guessing the OP is not American, based on the “.” vs. a “,”.
The food went way down hill over the years. They saved much more than a few olives
Using a . to say 40,000 is so gross
Even grosser to use the , for the cents potion of a price.
I’m sure it was a bean counter that came up with this idea
40 bucks, huh?
BA did this with cherry tomatoes recently.
Flashback to my first restaurant job: ‘you know how much money we’d save annually if everyone stopped giving out extra napkins?’
In the early 2000s I worked for Expedia. Was at an event put on by a different airline where they talked about their usability process for testing cabin configuration. Told my manager at the time “wow, that seems innovative”. He said “yeah but remember this is an industry that calculates the cost savings of taking an olive off your salad.”.
Eat the rich!
I would say that the restaurants do the same.
At thai restauraunt, I order shrimp fried rice. A big fried rice to go plate with only 2 shrimps.
…And there’s some random dude donated $4.7 mil to OF model for a few months
HOW MUCH ARE THESE OLIVES?!
Just eliminate everything one bite at a time until people don’t know they’re not eating.
….No article to link, OP?
The one I we used to hear about was that British Airways saved two billion pounds by removing one potato from their meal
It starts with an olive and ends with your legs
Hey, where did my olive go?
Bastards.