Yes, but can we stand United?

I have Facebook friends linking an article about how what's wrong with the United Airlines incident is what's wrong with America. As anti-corporate as I am, my first inclination was to disagree here. It refers to a case in which United Airlines realized it needed space on a passenger flight in order to emergency-transport its own employees; offered $800 plus a free room at a nice hotel to anyone who volunteered to be moved to a flight the next afternoon; then, when no one accepted, it called in police force to eject randomly-chosen passengers (including a surgeon who had an operation to do the next morning).

My immediate feeling is that while the resort to police is a problem, I've been
screwed over by corporate incompetence dozens of times in my life, and *not once* has anyone offered me $800 for a day of my time as an apology. Whatever is wrong with America, it would be less wrong if corporate screw-ups regularly came with cost and embarrassment to the owners.

One of my FB friends altered this feeling with a tale of his own experience with United Airlines last year. He volunteered to miss a flight in exchange for free hotel room, tickets on the next day's flight, and a voucher for a future free flight anywhere in the U.S. Despite hours of his efforts, he never got paid for the hotel; had to loudly argue for his right to be on the next day's flight, where he was not in fact expected; and never did receive his free-flight voucher. In other words, United's offer was, for him, pure fiction -- whether from ineptitude or malice, he'll never know.

*That* might stand out as a symbol for the America of my lifetime. More and more power gets transferred to corporations because "private companies are efficient" and "government is wasteful". With only one exception, though, all my worst bureaucratic experiences have been with private companies. If they are efficient at anything, it is in vacuuming money into the pockets of the board of directors and the shareholders: this is, after all, their legal purpose, and the thing one should properly expect. As cases like this United story tell, it's not always clear they're super-brilliant even about that.

EDIT: Oh, look! Comparative airline data! Delta does the most overbooking, but also has an automatic silent auction during check-in in which customers decide what (cash!) payment they'd accept to be bumped, so it has the fewest *involuntary* ejections by far. United is below average in involuntary ejections too, actually: while they certainly handled this incident badly, they were a little unlucky to be the ones made notorious for it. Southwest is easily the worst, followed by American.