It's not that they'd pay individual employees more, it's that they'd hire more workers to account for the fact that their existing workers are tied up doing extra verification.

Though they might not do that either.

Even that fails a sanity test. They're not doing anything more than they would have done 25 years ago when the whole damn thing started.

I wasn't flying 25 years ago but I'm not sure what you mean, or how that's relevant actually. The point is just that it takes them more time to do the "extra screening" if you don't have your ID than the standard screening if you did have your ID.

Sure. A couple of things to clarify:

1. They're not doing screening. The screening comes later. At this stage, they're attempting to identify someone. That has never been the job. The job is to prevent guns, knives, swollen batteries, or anything else that could be a safety threat during air travel.

2. Regardless, the reality is that they do identify travelers. Even so, the job has not changed. If you don't present sufficient identification, they will identify you through other mechanisms. The only thing the new dictate says is that they don't want this document, they want that document.

> That has never been the job. The job is to prevent guns, knives, swollen batteries, or anything else that could be a safety threat during air travel.

A job that by their own internal testing, they do well less than 5% of the time (some of their audits showed that 98% of fake/test guns that were sent through TSA got through checkpoints).

Do you not see how an organization discouraging the use of something inefficient benefits as a whole?

Thats why cashless businesses exist, why you pay more for things that involve human attention instead of automated online solutions etc.

Who does it benefit? Not me. Maybe it benefits Mastercard and Visa.

Yes it benefits the consumer through lower prices, and in the case of cashless specifically, less tax fraud, etc

Most businesses near me offer lower prices to people paying with cash.

High interchange fees?

https://www.clearlypayments.com/blog/interchange-fees-by-cou...

or tax fraud, otherwise cashless is obviously cheaper