Let's Buy Spirit Air
54 points by bjhess 2 hours ago | 34 comments

amazingamazing 36 minutes ago
> The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.

Noble, but this will fail. Why would anyone do this? No incentive.

These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business. You might as well get more pledges given that you'd have more control and the same profit share. It will regress to the same as the status quo.

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nerdsniper 21 minutes ago
I pledged $1,000. I have been daydreaming about a customer-owned airline for years now, just about every time I walk through an airport. This might not have much of a chance of succeeding in its purchase of Spirit’s assets, but I’d love to watch things unfold if it did.

> These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business.

For most businesses the size of Spirit Airlines, the owners typically do not operate the business. They pay people to do that. I don’t operate REI, even though I’m one of its many owners.

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iknowstuff 17 minutes ago
aren't there plenty of state owned airlines?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_airli...

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nerdsniper 14 minutes ago
Not in the USA. Also, the state’s interests often aren’t super well-aligned with the customers’ interests. Too many conflicts of interest for my taste.
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corvad 35 minutes ago
I'm not sure that's even noble as by buying you would be a shareholder...
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UqWBcuFx6NV4r 33 minutes ago
Yes. Reminds me of the “anarchists” that don’t realise that they just want to recreate the government but with their people in charge.
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paulddraper 27 minutes ago
“The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.”

Like, all people in the world?

Customers? Employees?

What does this mean?

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nerdsniper 12 minutes ago
IMHO this should have been written “to the customers and employees”. To me, those are the people who compose a business enterprise.
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morkalork 28 minutes ago
Co-ops don't exist at all, right?
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antoniojtorres 24 minutes ago
Random side note. Why do many of these (presumably) LLM stamped out sites have the same aesthetic where they all need a pulsating indicator at the top as if to indicate some sort of urgency aesthetic?
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notepad0x90 22 minutes ago
I could easily afford any of their competitors but I always picked Spirit airlines. The pricing makes sense, pay more if you need more things. I liked Spirit because it was more akin to riding the bus, I got treated well every time by their staff and the experience was fairly consistent.

Other airlines also have cramped sits, what little they did better than Spirit isn't worth the price, and the experience was inconsistent: some times you'll get nice flight attendants, a comfy plane, and a good check-in/check-out, other times you didn't. can't plan around them. With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably. Just about any inconvenience was some fee away to address it.

Frontier was the cheap airline that just wasn't worth it. On the flip side, AA was overpriced with snobbish (just my experience, very limited) staff. Because it's a "cheap" airline, Spirit came with low expectations, and it only exceeded them to the most part.

I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.

I don't think this effort to buy it will prevail, I only wish the GME betters were in on this action. The airline's value hasn't gone away, similar to Gamestop. The people like it, the demand for it there, the airlines assets and staff haven't lost their value. I don't see how it isn't a good investment. This attempt to buy it is to little, too late. but if it came in actual stock purchase agreements, I'm down for it. But donating random cash to some site as a pledge, I don't know about that.

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corvad 37 minutes ago
I get the idea but this seems very much something not credible, like who's behind it, what are the guarantees, etc.
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tech234a 27 minutes ago
It seems to be an Instagram user: https://www.instagram.com/spiritair2.0/ and his own account is https://www.instagram.com/hitherehunter/
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wewtyflakes 30 minutes ago
Maybe it is better to let the airline that treats people like adversarial cattle to die; maybe it is a good signal that that is a bad business model.
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corvad 29 minutes ago
Yes, but also one less anything in a highly competitive industry is a bad thing overall. Not saying I think it's a good idea but I seem a grain of reasoning behind it however misleading it might be.
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alex43578 16 minutes ago
If the industry is already highly competitive, which the US airline market is by any measure, one more marginal carrier accounting for just 3% of passenger miles, makes very little difference.
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anonymouscaller 40 minutes ago
Seems like an interesting idea. Wish I could get some more information on who is behind this website for credibility purposes
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godzillabrennus 37 minutes ago
Looks like an AI-generated site that says it's not for investment purposes but basically makes the case for investment... I'd run from this.
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corvad 36 minutes ago
Yeah it honestly seems like an opportunity scam.
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kylecazar 38 minutes ago
Average pledge size is $666 (from 40k pledges). That strikes me as a lot. And obviously cursed.
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danpalmer 34 minutes ago
That's like 39,900 people pledging at the minimum $45, and 100 investors pledging at $250k. Averages can be misleading.
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corvad 30 minutes ago
Agreed, a median would be a better indication.
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kylecazar 29 minutes ago
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swaits 19 minutes ago
Let’s throw good money after bad!!!

Brilliant.

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opengrass 16 minutes ago
Looks like well-worded scam.
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dmitrygr 10 minutes ago
So many airline crashes were traced back to “poor company culture” by NTSB that I would never consider flying a company owned by random internet people. Having someone with a lot to lose in charge of things is a feature.
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alex43578 14 minutes ago
LOL. Will this be the first AI-slop to earn an SEC investigation?
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Teever 28 minutes ago
I'm not American and I've never flown Spirit Air so can someone explain where all the loyalty to this airline is coming from? Like isn't this another big corp biting the dust?
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loloquwowndueo 3 minutes ago
No, it’s a small corp biting the dust.
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ceroxylon 19 minutes ago
They had affordable flights between places like LA and Vegas / Florida and Cancún so it became almost like a bus route for some people.
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s0rce 16 minutes ago
Not sure, maybe people like the underdog or just like the business model, you pay for what you get. I flew them a couple times and it wasn't great.
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icco 19 minutes ago
It and Frontier were the only affordable airlines.
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crooked-v 18 minutes ago
I wonder how much money I could get from starting a Kickstarter to attempt to* buy up as much of Spirit as possible.

*and fail to

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thrill 31 minutes ago
Let’s not.
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petra303 34 minutes ago
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vicchenai 23 minutes ago
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gordian-mind 27 minutes ago
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solomonb 21 minutes ago
I have a pitch to buy American Spirits and American airlines to bring back smoking on airplanes. I would be happy to pivot to purchasing Spirit Air.

https://cofree.coffee/~solomon/InhaleLabs_PitchDeck.pdf

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