Tuesday, February 16, 2010

How Kevin Smith made the top story on CNN.com

I'd be willing to bet that bookmakers in Vegas are now laying odds on which "Evening with Kevin Smith" dvd will contain the rant about Southwest Airlines.  I'm thinking number 5, depending on how far along they are on producing number 4.

This is not a good thing for Southwest, because Smith is pretty much a self-effacing and honest guy with a pretty rabid fan base.  Which means he's not going to sugar coat it ("Dude, I know I'm fat,") and it's going to get a lot of play online.  Witness the fact that in the middle of the Winter Olympics it topped CNN's web page.  

Probably this won't be a major financial issue for Southwest, but it is going to focus a lot of attention on their fat people removal policy.  Plus a fair number of Smith fans are big guys like him, and I'm betting they're going to be avoiding Southwest at all costs in the future.

1 comment:

kati kyushu said...

Wow, I'm listening to the smodcast now and I just can't believe it. And now people are getting all mad at him because he's well-known! That's such crap. The airlines screwed up, and they get to blame it on him and stay sweeky clean???? I hate that. It just all happens because of the corporate idea that you can't take responsibility for anything. He would have dropped the whole thing if they'd just said "Our bad." But they couldn't do that because they're stupid and now they are trying to pass the blame to him.

I'm soo on point with what he says about how much it sucks that there's no one there to help you at the gate. I ran into that problem when I was coming back from Japan and I hadn't slept on the plane and I had to make a connection. They changed my gate and I barely had enough time to get to the right gate. I was afraid I was reading it wrong and I wanted to ask for some help - if I was wrong I would miss my plane. But there was no one to be found in the vicinity of the three gates.