Fewer.
That sort of annoys me every time. I once mentioned it smilingly to a cashier who blankly told me to take it up with the manager, whatever it was I was babbling about.
What’s interesting to me is how regional that widespread disregard is.
One of the side effects of my job is stopping in at random grocery stores near hotels near airports all over the country. To buy a handful of items for tonight’s “dinner” & tomorrow’s breakfast.
Some areas nobody complies with express line item limits. Other places everyone does.
I’ve always said there’s a critical mass effect for public assholishness. Below the threshold, naming and shaming works to keep the number of jerks to a tiny percentage of the public. If somehow the number jumps past a mysterious threshold, then the “you’re a sap if you don’t” effect takes over and jerks proliferate to become the majority or nearly so.
Clearly some parts of the country are well over that threshold. It’s correlated with crowding and population density, but it’s not as simple as just that.
I am laughing more at this than any sane person should :D:D
And Leo Bloom: “12 items or less” makes me homicidal :mad:
But I just discovered this. Has anyone ever flown petairways? It’s kind of pricy, but way cheaper than other private planes I’ve looked into.
Mea culpa for not inserting [nitpick] and leaving out the word “error” in my original reply cited below, and, since I’m surprised at all of you, an admonitio ad filii spiritualem, for not realizing how truly well I can hijack (or attempt to hijack) a thread with an irrelevant interjection. I was simply being commafucker.
- Record needle scratch *
At this point the thread continues*, sensibly enough, using what is thought to be my entirely-appropriate chime-in on see-what-happens-when-you-start-letting-in-fing-dogs-on-a-fing-airplane. Which gave me far too much credit. (Had I not posted this very note none would have been the wiser, but then I’d be stuck with a private mea maxima culpa.**)
*
[/SIZE]
Here I need another mea culpa for taking pride in confession.
Addendum footnote to footnote **:
***Add one more for taking pride in thinking that anyone gives a fuck.
Probably a complex function of social demographics and pure randomness, perhaps store policy too. But I live in very close in NY area (lots of a-holes generally right? at least according to the anti-NY lore that’s one thing still uniting most other Americans 
), a gentrified area (lots of a-hole yuppies, right?), and people seem to generally abide by the ‘less than’ item limits. It’s helped in the main supermarket I go to though by ‘around’, with separate lines for ‘less than around 10’, 15 and 20 items, and a big supermarket with lots of regular lines. It makes it more obvious what a jerk somebody is if they completely flout it.
I have an occupational POV from a somewhat different angle: I’m a psychiatrist, and thus frequently see people who come to me in order to obtain some specific thing other than symptom relief–what we call “secondary gain”–one of which is, occasionally, the request for an FSA. I recently got “fired” by a patient who became very upset and started demanding to see someone “higher up” than me, when I refused to write a letter designating his precious Fluffy–which he carries around with him in public in a sling over his arm–as a “psychiatric service dog.”
While having a successful professional life requires putting on the face of the compassionate, nonjudgmental doctor, I’m actually a hard-nosed traditionalist and in particular the issue of people increasingly elevating the status of pets in their life and substituting them for real children is one of my pet (heh) peeves. When I’m in an airport and I see someone walking around with a little toy poodle which is clearly not a guide dog, I mutter to myself “just get on the plane and leave your damn dog at home.” So I’m glad there are people in the airline industry who feel the way you do.
Thank you for sticking your finger in the dike of this tide. The specific item of pets as quasi-children leaves me cold as an individual but probably doesn’t have too much deep societal significance. An adverse development to be sure, but not fatal.
The widespread attitude that any kind of community spirit is for saps will be the end of western civilization. It’s a direct race to barbarism.
If you want to see just how insane the selling of “Registered Service Animal” (for $30) has become:
Go read the “Room Wanted” ads on Craigslist.
These are people who can’t afford renting even a cheap studio - they are scraping the bottom of the rental stock market.
…No deposit… can’t pay more than (less than market for even a 10x10 room in a poor part of town)… Will help with (name of tasks they will NOT actually perform)… and my 3 Registered Service Animal cats.
At least most of them don’t smoke.
And they wonder why their phones don’t ring.
I’ll chime in.
Bobkitty has made some pointed, accurate remarks in this thread. Bobkitty has also been very respectful and restrained. I’ll bump that up a notch.
Some people need to learn the meaning of personal responsibility and the word - “no”
OP, I understand you want your 30lb dog with you on a pt 121 carrier. You can’t. That’s the most direct answer.
Many on this thread have given advice on how to ‘twist’ the system. Not everything is a stupid ‘life hack’ where you get ‘likes’ for demonstrating how to screw something up for everyone else.
As flight crew, or as a paying passenger, I don’t want your 30 lb dog on my aircraft. There will be many, many others who don’t as well. My airline has a policy that says basically, crated, papered, vaccinated, and under the seat in front of you, including the crate. There are also restrictions on where on the aircraft you and your animal can sit.
One of my companies dispatch managers uses a service dog. She went thru a very long, very expensive process to procure her service animal. She’s commented numerous times that much of the extra scrutiny and documentation she’s been required to produce, is directly related to the increasing number of people trying to ‘game the system’ with their ‘therapy pets’.
Sometimes the answer is just no.
If it’s only a 5 day trip, then getting a dog-sitter to take care of your dog while you are away would probably be the way to go. Yes, I know I am being callous and not helpful in answering your question, but is there a real need for the dog to come along? Is it for your/kids’ benefit, or for the dog’s benefit?
I can understand not wanting to put your dog into cargo, but are you confident about your dog being able to handle the airport/main cabin? Are you willing to risk being booted off the plane (whether it’s due to your dog freaking out or you arriving unprepared for boarding your dog properly)?
Actually two people on this thread have given advice on how to twist the system. Everyone else has been pointing out at great length and in excrutiating detail why twisting the system is a bad idea, and only done by assholes.
Actually, I can. I’ve discovered http://petairways.com/ where pets can fly in the main cabin
We have a lot of pets, besides the dog and usually our pet sitter stays in our house when we are gone. But this year she will be out of town, and while I was able to find someone to come over daily and feed the other pets, I wasn’t able to find someone trustworthy who will stay in the house. Hence I was looking for a way to get the dog from point A to point B and back with us, but didn’t want her going in cargo.
Yes I am confident that my dog could handle herself properly in the main cabin–only problem is that no commercial airline will allow that unless she is a Service Dog. And as muldoonthief accurately noted, neither I nor most others who posted in this thread were in favor of 'gaming the system". My dog will either fly petairways or we’ll stay home this year.
Have you talked to a live person there yet? The website is full of fresh looking breathless “we’re now open for business!” content. All dated late 2011 and zero since. :eek:
If their business is still alive that’s all to the good. But don’t get your hopes up too far until you’ve talked to them for real.
If your flight is really “cross country” as in coast-to-coast their price looks to be about $20,000 each way. That’s for 3 people and one dog. Ouch.
Not to mention they seem to fly in small lowish-speed turboprop aircraft that would probably take 12 hours coast to coast vice the usual 6 in a jet. Plus time out for 2 fuel stops.
I’ll offer the same advice I do for folks talking about moving furniture cross-country for short term moves: All in all it’s definitely cheaper to buy a new dog at the destination and another new dog when you get back.
I’m betting that the OP is staying home this year.
Looks like it shut down in 2011: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-wiesel-b9b5106
No. I filled out an online form and hit submit! Looks like I"m out of luck. I’ll just buy another dog when I get there 
I just got redirected to another site: http://www.animalairways.com/
Is it a scam, out of business, etc? LMK, thanks!!
Have you read it? The service that site purports to provide is to assist you with exporting or importing your pet internationally.
If there were an airline that specialized in people+pet travel in heavy jets at comparable prices to regular flights, I think we’d all have heard about it. There’s an obvious reason that it doesn’t exist. Imagine a flight that consisted of 200 people and 200 dogs all sitting unrestrained on seats. How do you think that would go?
Fair enough, I stand corrected!