Fly American, Steal A Wife
From much the same era, or perhaps a bit earlier, in which Chairman Mao was trying to swap away ten million women, we have American Airlines grousing about people stealing its friendly stewardesses. The following was captioned “People keep stealing our stewardesses.”
And the explanation:
Within two years, most of our stewardesses will leave us for other men.
This isn’t surprising.
A girl who can smile for 5 and a half hours is hard to find.
Not to mention a wife who can remember what 124 people want for dinner.
(And tell you all about meteorology and jets, if that’s what you’re looking for in a woman.)
But these are not the things that brought on our problem.
It’s the kind of girl we hire. Being beautiful just isn’t enough.
(We don’t mean it isn’t important. We just mean it isn’t enough.)
So if there’s one thing we look for, it’s girls who like people. And you can’t do that and then tell them not to like people too much.
All you can do is put a new wing on your stewardess college to keep up with demand.
American Airlines
From Vintage Ads.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=2177
From a purely capitalist’s standpoint, I suppose one could say it appears they received a better offer. It seems the proper response would have been to keep raising their pay, until the process reversed itself.
In many industries it’s normal for labor to transit through the industry on the way to better opportunities. In such industries, all of the training and employee policies are set up to assume that nobody will be working the job forever. Fast food is the classic modern example.
Based on the cartoon, in addition to being beautiful and smart, having huge boobs is also a prerequisite. Not that I’m complaining.
Don’t worry– we’ll just accept Mao’s offer of ten million women and send them to stewardess school.
As I have just returned from an internatiional trip through three “third world” airlines and one North American airline, I can say that fair labour practices have definitely impacted the demographics of stewardesses – NA – average age 35+, Asia – under 25. Cute factor definitely skewed too. ‘Course being 54, I thought the one in my section on our NA flight was a pretty hot 40 year old with the confidence (and kindness) to flirt with an “older man”
I suspect without the security of fair labour practices and personal freedoms, all you would get from the young Asian cuties is a professional smile, while that 40 year old may just be free and looking…