American Airlines successfully saved forty thousand dollars in a single year during the late nineteen eighties simply by removing one single olive from every first-class side salad.

A closer look

American Airlines successfully saved forty thousand dollars in a single year during the late nineteen eighties simply by removing one single olive from every first-class side salad. This micro-optimization is legendary in corporate cost-cutting history and perfectly encapsulates the ruthless penny-pinching of the modern transportation industry. They realized that passengers were barely eating the sad little salads anyway, so trimming a tiny fraction of an ingredient per plate across thousands of flights added up to a massive financial windfall. This is exactly why your current economy class experience feels like a survival challenge. The executives know that if they can save thousands by taking away an olive, they can save millions by shrinking your legroom to the width of a smartphone and charging you twenty bucks for a bottle of water