So, I'm living in the Netherlands, and recently I booked a flight to the US with American Airlines. I bought it via a Dutch website, but now that the flight is coming closer, AA is sending me e-mails, and dear god.
“Go to the American Airlines app to streamline your airport experience” – airport experience? It's a frickin airport, not a theme park. A place where you wait in lines, go through annoying security checks and if you're hungry you're forced to buy overpriced food (well, now that I'm typing it it actually sounds surprisingly similar to a theme park, but whatever).
And then when you go to the app, you need to register, which they pitch with “turn flights and everyday purchases into lifetime memories”. What type of late-capitalist dystopian propaganda is this? *Over the top American accent* “Ohmygaaaawd typing in my credit card number when I bought an American Airlines flight was an AMAZING experience! Such good memories!”
Maybe I'm being irrational with how strongly this irritates me, but in case you were wondering, this is not normal. At which point did the American public decide to just accept that the most mundane, annoying things like waiting in an airport or being cramped in an uncomfortable flying metal box for 9 hours are being sold as “experiences”? How did people allow for it to become normalized to openly speak about consuming as “lifetime memories”?
Companies in Europe don't talk like this. Even the American ones, and we have plenty of them here. Because they would be ridiculed and perceived as extremely annoying.
Okay. That was my little rant.