Spirit Airlines Shutdown: A Business Ethicist Reflects on the 'Ultra-Low-Cost' Carrier's Legacy

I flew Spirit Airlines out of LaGuardia on April 28. With the announcement just days later that the carrier was shutting down, it felt a little like catching the last chopper out of Saigon. Then again, every time you flew Spirit felt a little like catching the last chopper out of Saigon.

There were the improbably tiny bags, people packed tightly in seats, and an ever-present sense that the simmering confusion could at any moment break out into full-blown calamity. Like most people, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Spirit. Unlike most people, I once expressed it to the face of Ben Baldanza, the former CEO of Spirit.

In 2015, I wrote an essay for The New Republic with the subtitle “A business school professor studies the world’s worst airline.” Within an hour of it appearing online, the CEO of said airline had emailed me to propose a debate. We met a few weeks later at the downtown campus of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where I still teach business ethics, and before a large crowd that included his executive team, we debated the moral hygiene of Spirit’s unusual business practices.

By then, Baldanza had been the head of Spirit Airlines for nearly a decade, and he was the driving force behind its transformation from merely a low-cost carrier, like Southwest or JetBlue, to an ultra-low-cost carrier. The distinction between them turns on relative deprivation. No one will ever confuse the cabin of JetBlue for a Learjet, but at least in 2015, air travel on both involved choosing your seats, bringing your bags aboard, and chowing down on snacks. Not Spirit. Not for free, at least.

The ‘bare fare’ Spirit pioneered à la carte pricing in American air travel with the introduction of what it called the “bare fare.” When you bought a ticket to fly on Spirit, you didn’t get snacks, seat choice, or (God forbid) a carry-on. These were privileges. You had to pay for them. You got a seat. Period.

Baldanza ballyhooed this invention as a cost-saving strategy for customers.

“All of our differences are about saving our customers money,”

Sitting with your kids, packing more than a single set of drawers, and noshing on peanuts were all part of what it meant to fly. Yes, flying was the essential part of flying, but eating is also the essential part of eating, and if a waiter tries to sell you a knife and fork at a restaurant, you will still feel an urge to tell him to stick his frittata where the sun don’t shine. Back in 2015, it didn’t seem like Spirit was selling