Hi,
Just out of interest, I was wondering why an employee, or Amtrak's procedures themselves, undermining their profit was a concern? Obviously if you are hungry and they don't have what you want, or indeed anything, to eat then that goes without saying, but I just wondered why them not maximising profit would be an issue to passengers? I don't know much about Amtrak but from what I've read it seems they often make a loss(?), so is it more based on concern about their preservation as a company so that their train journeys can continue to be enjoyed?
You're sort of on the point there, but I can focus my concern in a bit more...
There are amenities, such as the PPC, which need to generate revenue to justify their existence to certain people in the world. I will even grant that some of this behavior is not without merit (after all, there have been things that Amtrak has done which ultimately made very little business sense and didn't do a decent job of making up for it on the passenger side of things), though it can go a bit far. Most of this centers on food service, though the available service in the PPC is another such item on the Coast Starlight.
I care about these things because they are a non-trivial part of my life: I care about diner service because I use the diner an average of once every two weeks (I regularly take the Meteor home from DC to Richmond, and steak dinners on there are something I regularly look forward to, while I do miss having more variety on the Star north to DC). There's something I love about being able to do this, and I'm inclined to do everything I can to defend it in no small part because I use it with great regularity. To me, this service isn't some abstract item out on a balance sheet...it is something I've used dozens of times and which if I am able to, God willing, will use hundreds more.
The PPC I appreciate because of its uniqueness. It adds significant value to a trip from LA to San Francisco or Seattle, if just because there is extra room there. The wifi, when available and working, is also nice...it helps make the time less of a waste in many respects...
But I digress. I care because I use Amtrak. I know how tenuous what we have is and I know the impact that a single employee making a regular hash of a service can have. For example, block out 4 passengers from dinner once a week and you could easily just have cost Amtrak over $5000; do that on every train with a diner once a week, each way, and you're looking at as much as $140,000 (if not more, once you throw in drink purchases). Shut down the wine tasting once a week and you're looking at a couple thousand dollars there as well. Yes, there's COGS to throw in, but so much of the cost here is fairly fixed that it
does matter and efforts on these fronts one way or another can have a non-trivial impact on the cost recovery numbers the diners post.
I'll scale this up a bit more to drive the point home: Let us assume, for a moment, that every diner crew made an effort to fill one more table at dinner on every train throughout 2015. Let us assume that no salads were purchased, that the entree was the average of the 5 available ($19.30), that one half of an average dessert was sold per person ($2.625; I excluded the sugar free option), and that one half of a serving of alcohol was sold per person ($3.00). So your average person just added $24.925 to diner revenue. At four per table, that's $99.70 per dinner; if you do this for each of the dinners served, you get around 35 tables/night, times 365 days...that's something like $1.27m/yr in revenue for the dining car. I can't peg the COGS figure there, but you should be able to do this on a lot of trains without seriously affecting staff allocations...so you'd probably close diner losses by at least $500-700k/yr on that one filled table at each night's dinner. And you know what? $500-700k/yr is a
long way towards adding another sleeper to the fleet every few years.
