It’s the end of an era for giant GE

Make Me Smart April 3, 2024 Transcript

Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it.

Kimberly Adams 

Hello everyone, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Amy Scott 

And I’m Amy Scott, filling in today for Kai Ryssdal. Thank you for joining us this Wednesday. It is April 3.

Kimberly Adams 

And today, we are going to do some news and then some smiles. Let’s get to it. Amy, what caught your attention today?

Amy Scott 

Well, a couple items about the seven aid workers who were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Monday while after they unloaded food on behalf of this group, World Central Kitchen. It’s of course a terrible tragedy. The first thing I read that I recommend is a piece that ran in the New York Times by Chef José Andrés himself. He’s the founder of World Central Kitchen, and he wrote about the people who were killed, calling them “the best of humanity, who risked everything to bring food to people who needed it.” But also, there was another Times piece by reporter Kim Severson about this organization, World Central Kitchen and how it really pioneered a new way to deliver emergency relief. I think those of us in the mid-Atlantic region are familiar with this group. Chef José Andrés has a lot of restaurants in the DC area. But this aid effort started in 2010, when he was in Haiti after a major earthquake, and was cooking with Haitians who were living in a camp and learning local recipes from them and kind of realized that emergency food aid would work better and be more comforting to people experiencing disasters if it was local cuisine made by local chefs. So, he really expanded to use this network of local chefs to serve meals in Houston after Hurricane Harvey and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. I learned about the group during the COVID 19 pandemic when a local chef or restaurant owner that I interviewed here in Baltimore was providing free meals through the organization. And you know, as it’s gotten bigger, the group has faced criticism. Last year, Bloomberg News reported allegations that the group had mishandled accusations of sexual harassment by a senior manager, and some have, you know, said the organization pushes people to deliver food and unsafe conditions. But, you know, it’s been a significant source of aid in Ukraine and in Gaza. And now the future is really uncertain after the strike, World Central Kitchen sent tons of food back to Cyprus because it was just too unsafe to deliver in Gaza. Other groups have suspended operations. And of course, you know, at a time when experts say famine is imminent in parts of the country.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, it’s such a sad, sad story. And World Central Kitchen has, did you ever see the documentary? I think it was called we fed an island or something like that about them.

Amy Scott

No, I didn’t.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah, they’ve been covered a couple times, but I didn’t know this concept about making local food. I know that the point was to cook the food there rather than send just sort of prepackaged stuff, but that does make, I think, a big difference sort of the paying attention to the comfort that food can bring in a crisis. But yeah, that’s a really sad story.

Amy Scott 

Yeah. So, how about you?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I’ve got two items. Um, the first one is just sort of a bit of a marker. So, on Tuesday, GE finalized this process of splitting into three separate parts. And GE, for a really long time, has been this huge conglomerate with all sorts of different components to it. And over the years has just been kind of spinning off different segments of the company. And so, Tuesday marks GE kind of finishing that unwinding. And I’m going to read how Axios sums it up. “The legacy of former GE CEO Jack Welch lies in tatters. GE no longer exists — its split into three separate parts concluded Tuesday —  and his school of management has barely fared any better. Welch was the most important CEO of his generation, a man who was richly rewarded for using financial engineering to goose his company’s share price at the expense of its employees’ jobs.” And then it scrolls down that “the last remaining Welch disciple is helming a major U.S. public company is David Zaslav at Warner Brothers Discovery. So far reviews of his tenure have been mixed at best. Welch was a bona fide corporate hero in the 1990s. Today, he is viewed much more as a villainous creature of corporate excess.”

Amy Scott

Wow.

Kimberly Adams

And it’s kind of the end of an era. I know Kai’s done a couple of stories on Jack Welch and GE. But yeah, it was just sort of the end of this arc of these massive companies that do everything and kind of manipulate the way that the market see it, and this sort of corporate ruthlessness that Jack Welch kind of perpetuated. So, that was the first thing.

Amy Scott

The end of an era.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah, it is kind of the end of an era of giant GE. The other thing is, there is news out today about JetBlue. Actually, it was also out yesterday. JetBlue is raising its baggage fees. JetBlue is one of the several airlines that have recently announced that they’re going to raise baggage fees, but JetBlue is doing it with dynamic pricing. Now remember, Wendy’s got into a lot of trouble for saying that they might consider dynamic pricing. But JetBlue is kind of like yeah, we’re doing it for real for real. And so, here’s CNN summary of it. “The price of a first checked bag now ranges from $35 to $50 under a recently revealed fee structure that depends on a number of factors, including the dates JetBlue, determines to be peak or off-peak. Peak dates encompass about half the year, including most of the busy summer travel season as well as dates before and after the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.” You get a discount if you check the bag earlier than like, the day before the flight. But it’s going to be pretty expensive, you know, and increasingly expensive to check bags. So.

Amy Scott 

And also more confusing, right? It’s like, how much am I paying today?

Kimberly Adams 

Right. Because the price of your bag if it changes, it could be a kind of surprise. If you see the cost of a plane ticket. That seems pretty cheap, but then once you add on all the fees like, does it even make a difference? Should you have gone with a different airline? But I saw this piece in The Conversation a while back, and The Conversation is this website that has academics writing news articles about their research. And the headline is “Why do airlines charge so much for checked bags? This obscure rule helps explain why.” So, it turns out and this is a business school professor who wrote this. His name is J Zara Zara Zagorski. Excuse me, Jay Zagorsky. And Jay Zagorsky says, “Airlines pay the federal government 7.5% of the ticket price when flying people domestically, alongside other fees. The airlines disliked these charges, with their trade association arguing that they boost the cost to the consumer of a typical air ticket by around one-fifth. However, the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations specifically excludes baggage from the 7.5% transportation tax as long as ‘the charge is separable from the payment from for the transportation of a person and is shown in the exact amount.’” So, here’s an example. “This means if an airline charges a combined $300 to fly you and a bag round-trip within the U.S., it owes $22.50 in tax. If the airline charges $220 to fly you plus separately charges $40 each way for the bag, then your total cost is the same — but the airline only owes the government $16.50 in taxes. Splitting out baggage charges saves the airline $6. So.

Amy Scott 

That’s so annoying.

Kimberly Adams

Right. So. “The government has tracked revenue from bag feeds for decades. In 2002, airlines charged passengers a total of $180 million dollars to check bags, which worked out to around 33 cents per passenger. When the full data is in for 2023, total bag fees will likely top $7 billion which is about $9 for the average domestic passenger. By splitting out the cost of bags, airlines avoided paying about half a billion dollars in taxes just last year.”

Amy Scott 

Wow. I had no idea.

Kimberly Adams 

Neither did I until I saw this article. This is why we get smart together on Make Me Smart and get angry together also.

Amy Scott 

Yeah, well of course now I’m thinking about JetBlue raising these prices. And you know, just wondering if that sends more people ultimately to Southwest, which I don’t know if they’re the only, but they don’t charge for two bags. You know, you have to put up with some other things like no assigned seating.

Kimberly Adams 

I actually love that. I love the no assigned seating.

Amy Scott 

Do you? I just flew with assigned seating for the first time in a long time, and it was weird. Like, I didn’t know what to do, you know, like. I have a seat that I have to sit in. It was surprising.

Kimberly Adams 

Same. I flew on Delta for the first time in a really long time, like last year. Because you know, I’m from St. Louis, and Southwest has a big hub there. And so, I end up flying back and forth. And if I’m traveling on the East Coast, I usually take the train. And so, I was just like, what is this and there is no better demonstration of income inequality and social stratification based on income in our economy, I think than lining up at the airport. And seeing all of the different classes of people literally broken out, just depending on how much you paid for your ticket. And it’s like it yeah, kind of wrinkles sometimes.

Amy Scott 

And walking through the airplane past the seats that lie flat to the back of the plane in my case with no legroom. Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, on that wonderful note about being cramped with no space. Let’s move on to our smiles. So, hat tip to Alex Schroeder on our morning team for flagging this story for me, which is funny, I should have like known it myself because I reported on something similar just a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, the Biden administration has made a new announcement about an effort to reduce the cost of childcare for low-income families. So, it says, “Many families that receive government assistance for childcare still pay a lot out of pocket. A new Biden administration rule will lower those costs and improve payments to daycare providers. At the end of February, President Joe Biden’s administration announced it was going to require every state to cap its copayments so that families that receive subsidies for daycare pay no more than 7% of their income towards childcare. That will make a big difference in places like New Hampshire, West Virginia and Ohio, where those costs are eating up to 18 to 27 percent of family’s budgets. Though the new rule does not apply to the thousands of other families whose incomes are too high for subsidies but are also paying exorbitant costs, it does address the acute need among the lowest-income families, most of whom are families of color. More than 100,000 families are expected to benefit and are expected to save about $200 a month on average, according to the White House.” And those are the families who often need that help the most, and I am glad they’re getting some relief because everything I hear from the parents around me, childcare costs are just unbelievable these days.

Amy Scott 

Yeah, and yet the childcare workers struggle to get by.

Kimberly Adams

Make almost nothing.

Amy Scott

Yeah, this terrible paradox. Yeah, that’s a lot of money in your pocket to spend on other necessities.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, here in DC, they did like a one-time cash payout for childcare workers during the pandemic. And I think it was like $10,000. Just like please don’t quit. We need you.

Amy Scott 

Yeah. Right. Talk about essential workers.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah, yeah. All right. What’s your smile?

Amy Scott

Speaking of childhood. So, Disney is in the news today because of a big shareholder meeting. That’s not what I’m going to talk about. Another Disney story. If you’ve ever been to Disneyland, you may have done the Autopia ride where you kids can drive these little gas-powered cars around a track. It’s very cute, gives them a feeling that they’re driving. But it also smells terrible, like standing in line. The fumes are just awful. There’s a ride like that at an amusement park in Pennsylvania called Dutch Wonderland and it’s just a terrible smell. But anyway, a column in the LA Times yesterday broke the news that Disney is actually planning to ditch pure gas engines and move to electrify the ride within the next few years. I think it’s significant and maybe a little ironic that this ride is in Tomorrowland, which is supposed to be all about the future. But they’ve been stuck in gas guzzling cars for, you know, since the 50s. Or whenever it started. But the columnist who’s a climate journalist named Sammy Roth argues that Disney could do a lot more in Tomorrowland to promote clean energy and sustainability. As he points out, “To be clear, Disney should have converted Autopia to electric years ago.” So, it’s a start.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. I have never been to Disneyland actually.

Amy Scott

Really?

Kimberly Adams

Yeah, I’ve been to Disney World several times. My family really.

Amy Scott 

Is there an Autopia in Disneyworld? I honestly can’t remember. But you may not have been caused to go there if you didn’t have a five-year-old who was clamoring to drive.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, I mean, I would go as a child. I’m trying to remember. As an adult I don’t recall, like I know they have like a Cars ride like from the movie or something like that. I don’t know if there’s any kind of like vehicle thing. I know there’s like some little buggies that you can like, ride around in for that were somehow related to Alice in Wonderland. I don’t remember actually.

Amy Scott

Oh, yeah. I remember those.

Kimberly Adams

I’m sure we’ve got some Disney fans among the audience who can tell us exactly what rides are available in what place, but until we hear and get that intel from you all that is it for us today. We will be back tomorrow. And until then you can send us your thoughts, questions, ride recommendations, comments, or any audio clips that you think we should talk about to makemesmart@marketplace.org Or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program was engineered by Jayk Cherry. And Thalia Menchaca is our intern.

Amy Scott 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.

Kimberly Adams 

One of the maintenance guys in the building or the DC Bureau is like a roller coaster enthusiast and travels all over the country riding roller coasters. And every time I see, like new photos of some wild coaster he’s been on.

Amy Scott 

That’s super fun. Love it.

Kimberly Adams 

Isn’t it?

Amy Scott 

It’s a good hobby. Yeah.

Kimberly Adams 

A bit expensive though, I think.

Amy Scott

Oh yeah.