>>536144
Atlantafag here to tell you that it is apparent that people with entire lobes of their brain missing altogether can now get a job at the Wall Street Journal.
Guess how much it would cost to "move" Delta Air Lines. First, they'd have to wait until some OTHER airport opened up the ludicrous number of gates Delta uses at ATL, if those gates even existed. The cost would make the bean-counters revolt and set the CEO's office on fire. But wait, there's more:
"In addition to its corporate headquarters, Delta also operates Delta TechOps, Delta's primary maintenance base and the largest airline hub in the world in Atlanta. It is also Delta's main gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean and a secondary transatlantic gateway." (Wikipedia)
So Delta's going to need commercial and industrial square footage for all THAT shit, too. The calculator jockeys are now in their offices, sharpening their knives.
Second, Atlanta is geographically positioned smack dab in the lower right hand corner of North America, perfectly placed to handle all the bazillion connecting flights from literally everywhere that go through there every day. The joke around here is that if you die and go to hell, you still gotta change planes in Atlanta. It's geographically desirable. This factor can't be mitigated.
Third, how about all those 80,000 employees, including 12,000 pilots. You move the buildings and the airplanes, and you have to move the already (expensively) trained employees. A bunch of them will quit or retire because they don't want to move, so then you have to beef up HR to hire and train a ton of NEW employees. Oh, and they have unions. Good luck with the union management, because they are coming for you.
Fourth, Delta has codesharing agreements with twenty other airlines from all over the world. How are those contracts worded? If Delta leaves ATL, must the contracts be renegotiated (money for lawyers), and if you pull that off, is it guaranteed that all 20 of them want to continue the codeshare? What is that terrifying sucking noise? It is the profit margin, being swept out into the ocean, never to be seen again.
I could go on, but the key thing is these articles are written by wet-behind-the-ears interns (because the media is bleeding itself to death, and young employees work cheap) and they don't know shit. Those kids, however earnest, do not and cannot have the institutional memory of anyone familiar with the business history of a company like Delta, and particularly not if they're not even FROM Atlanta and don't know any more about it than Timbuktu. The human resources outcome would be a volcanic shitshow, and I am telling you that based on what my buddy, a retired Delta captain, said: "Move? Fuck that, I just got the kitchen renovated."
This is enough to make any CEO want to commit hara-kiri. Nobody wants to ride herd on a pointless, bottom-line destroying move. Top management would be completely destroyed, because it's not like any other company would touch them for committing such a New Coke atrocity.
The world is absolutely malignant with idiocy these days. For the love of God, PLEASE start ignoring most of what barfs up from "media outlets"! How many times do I have to tell you? Those days are OVER! The dog is dead, okay? We need to give it a decent burial!
Fondly,
Crabby but experienced ancient newspaper curmudgeon