Airline stewardesses used to be pretty, but now they all seem to be old hag battle-ax grannies. On a good day.
At least on the domestic carriers. The ads I see for Korean airlines and Emirates indicate the visual factor might still be a draw for those.
US airlines used to have an age limit of 30 for stewardesses, who also had to be single, in addition to meeting weight and attractiveness limits. Then they unionized.
Gyms, bars, restaurants, high-end retail, airlines that aren’t Spirit.
Had a job interview at MTV London in the early 90s. Too many attractive young women there to concentrate on the interview.
Drug sales to doctors offices. A few years back I had a Tuesday morning appointment at my doctor. While I sat for the endless eternity in the waiting room, I beheld a bevy of beautiful, well proportioned HAWT young women strut in wearing short pencil skirts, low cut blouses and high heels. All rolling sample cases. I asked the receptionist what was up, she smiled and said “Pharma salesgirls”. Holy crap, were they special. I don’t know about the female docs, but the males had no chance.:eek:
In any university town the hostesses at busy restaurants are all beautiful. There’s a huge supply of attractive young women to do that job, and they hire for looks.
Flight attendants pick routes based on seniority so for flights to Europe (and other good vacation spots) from the US they tend to have older people working those routes.
I work in defense, and I can tell you that 100% of the women (and they are all women) that serve as civilian administrative assistants to Navy officers are all very attractive.
There’s a meme in the industry that the post-menopausal ones snag the Honolulu flights first, making them “Hawaii Five-Oh’s”.
Where I work.
Washington lobbyists. I know the public image of a lobbyist is a fat guy with a big cigar, but behind every fat guy there are at least three “legislative assistants” – ambitious, well dressed young men and women with brand new degrees in law, political science or public administration. And at least two of those three will be really good looking.
Those two probably won’t stay in Washington long enough to become senior lobbyists, though.
This doesn’t seem to give me much solace when I fly to Minneapolis or Oklahoma City. The flight attendants look pretty similar to the ones I have when I fly to the more-desirable vacation spots.
I’ve wondered where they find that many women who are that attractive, and are willing to do that. Everyone hates drug reps. Really.
See post #17.
It’s just not a glamour job for young women anymore. The job is hard, and if you’re flying a North American airline you’re flying with a company that is not going to waste a job on someone who’s pretty but incompetent, or risk a union going on strike over you firing senior people.
Media and PR. Lots of attractive and/or stylish people, even in print media.
They make a cubic buttload of money. That goes a long way towards inspiring willingness and makes it rather easy to ignore any hate.
Exactly so, and U.S. airlines haven’t used “attractive young stewardesses” as a marketing tool since the 1970s. Flight attendants’ role is to ensure the safety of the passengers; acting as “eye candy” or possible dating material hasn’t been part of the package for a very long time.
Parenthetically, my mother was a stewardess for United in the early 1960s. In that era, getting married or getting pregnant were both grounds for getting fired by the airline. She retired from the industry when she got married in '63, but several of her friends / roommates were among those who fought the airlines for changes to those employment rules, and they wound up making careers of it, working for decades.
Airlines are still real big on hiring cute men & women as FA’s and to a lesser extent, customer service / gate agents. The newhire classes at the training facilities look like fashion shows or auditions for those TV talent-finding contests.
As said above, demographics play a big part in the experience as seen from your end. An airline that was hiring like mad in the 1990s and hasn’t hired anyone since 9/11 will have lots of workers who were 25 then and almost 50 now. Plus however many older ones they already had before their big bubble expansion. But nobody younger.
Because hiring in the industry tends to be very episodic we have weird distributions. Made up example for a mainline legacy airline today: 25% age 20-30, 1% age 30-40, 5% age 40-50, 50% age 50-60, 20% age 61+.
There are still a lot of FAs who go into the job thinking of it as a temporary measure to see the world and meet some well-heeled bachelors. The ones who quit when they succeed at their goal are overwhelmingly the cheerleader / model lookalikes. So who’s left behind to make it a career are the more ordinary looking. Some of whom age magnificently. And others of whom simple age massively. It’s a harder life than it at first appears.
A complicating factor we’re starting to see is airlines hiring middle-aged people for those front-line service jobs. So age is no longer synonymous with seniority. Many divorced moms end up going into the career. Some with little kids; more with HS-aged or fully grown kids.
The Entertainment industry?
Q: When were you there?