The joke does have an important point, though. It's simply an exaggeration of actual practices. It's not so far from charging extra for aisle or window seats, charging extra for being able to board just marginally sooner than the other passengers, and charging extra for water and basic courtesy items. This model of finding ways to charge customers extra for standard expectations is a negative quality system. That is, the process of continuous improvement in customer satisfaction has been replaced with the ultimate quest to find extract money. Eventually, the extraction of money will lead to a collapse within the system because it does not serve the customers.
