A Little Cooperation, Please

Over the memorial day weekend, the wife and I flew from Boise to Kansas City to watch my nephew graduate. He was graduating from the Missouri Academy of Science, Mathematics and Computing. Through this special program, he completed his last two years of high school and his first two years of college simultaneously. On Saturday, he received his high school diploma and his associates degree simultaneously!

I am extremely proud of my nephew and all of my other nephews and my niece. Each of them is proving him/herself to be much more focused and talented than myself or my two siblings.

But that's not why I'm writing this. I'm writing this because of an injustice and imbalance in regulations when traveling by flight and airport commerce.

There is an old joke that states, "I asked my girlfriend where she wanted to go eat. She said, 'I don't care, as long as it's expensive.' So I took her to the airport." It rings true because airport food vendors know they can make greater-than-normal profits in these venues because, for the most part, they have a captive audience.

Some states (New Jersey is one, I think) have passed laws, ordinances, regulations, what have you, that do not allow the vendors to charge more at the airport than they would outside the airport. For the most part, however, this is not true.

To avoid being taken advantage of, many travelers will bring food items with them. It's a whole lot cheaper to bring a sandwich and a coke with you than it is to grab it on the run at an airport. But regulations have changed recently. The TSA or the DHS or the FAA or the LMNOP has decreed that liquids can no longer be brought into the security area. Any beverages past the security checkpoint must have been purchased within the security area.

In general, I have no problem with this rule. It seems a little arbitrary and unnecessary but, in general, I don't have a problem with it. What I have a problem with is the vendors charging $3.00 for a 1-liter bottle of water. I'm not even talking about premium bottled water such as Evian or Fiji, I'm talking about water that was most likely squirted out of a tap in New Jersey.

Is it too much to ask that, because we are FORCED, if we wish to travel by air, to purchase beverages from these vendors that they be forced to mitigate their prices? I have no problem paying a slightly elevated price, such as the $1.69 I paid for a $1.29 bottle of Dasani from McDonald's at the Boise airport, because I understand that the cost of doing business at the airport is probably higher than outside of the airport. What I do not understand and do not appreciate is being raped by money-hungry corporations just because nobody has told them they cannot or should not do it.

Can we please get a little bit of cooperation between the regulators and the vendors or the airports or the municipalities and have beverages available in the airport at a reasonable price?

Thank you