My sis’ sent me one of her regularly inane emails with 50 unsual but alleged interesting things. For some reason no. 45 caught my attention- confirm or deny for me please;
>45- American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.
sorry…don’t know where i’d be able to find stats to confirm or deny it, but i think it’s very possible. i mean, if each olive cost a penny, that’s only 4 million first class passengers in a year. sounds reasonable. the only thing i’d look for is if the company actually did make a corporate decision to subtract one olive from a salad. the economics of it seem plausible; i just don’t know whether such a decision was made by some cost-cutter.
You’re talking major factoid here. Widely posted on the Web.
And here’s the really neat part. About half the Google hits for “American Airlines olive salad” give the amount saved as $440,000, which seems to make more sense to me. Forty thou is a pretty piddly amount for such a big airline.
My WAG would be that yeah, it’s true. It sounds like the sort of cost-cutting thing that really happens.
OK. Let’s do the math.
American Airlines, according to this site had 7 million passengers for the month. Without picking this apart for seasons, etc. we can assume they flew approximately 84 million people in a year.
If we assume a generous percent of them were first-class passengers, say 20%(which I know is stupidly high), then 16 million people flew first class in that year.
If they saved $440,000. on olives in that year, then each passenger had an olive worth about 2.75 cents. This sounds right.
DDG You go girl…
I heard it as “a decoritive piece of [lettuce or parsley]”. The dollar figure was $400k and change.
Hey, you guys are forgetting to factor in the fuel savings from not having to carry all those extra olives around! Don’t ask me to calculate that, but that surely needs to be factored in there somewhere.
And whilst I can’t refute the olive thing, there were a number of other dubious entries;
“The elephant is the only animal that can’t jump”
Wrong!: the snails in my garden can’t jump either.
“No new animals have been brought into domestication in the last 4000 years”
Wrong!:
Livestock:Emus, Ostriches, Kangaroos, probably a whole load of others too.
Pets: Hamsters, Gerbils, Degus, RATS, a whole load of reptiles and invertebrates too.
So I’d be inclined to take the whole list with a pinch of salt.