The article mentions American Airlines. They have about 70,000 staff, and millions of customers.
When you have that many customers you need a way to weed out the people who could, but don't, follow simple documentation so you can spend time on people who have fixable problems.
Furthermore, the company cannot just allow customer reps to 'bend a policy here,
[...] expedite an order there, [...] bubble an issue up to a manager'. If you
give them the freedom to bend policies, they can choose to draw their own lines
and that can result in adverse effects for the company overall. Bending of rules
is too risky for a large company to allow their customer reps to take. It's a
slippery slope, but honestly one that doesn't seem to have much of a solution.
So, why is that? It's not because Zappos is a small company nor is it because American Airlines is a huge one. It has to do with markets. Zappos is in a highly competitive market. Not only are they competing with other online retailers, but they're competing with brick-and-mortar stores as well. In order to sell shoes online, they know that they have to not only match the offline shopping experience, but exceed it, in order to make up for the inherent risk premium assigned to novel types of shopping. They edge they've chosen is customer service. Zappos has the generous return policy that it has because they know that you're already sacrificing some convenience in shopping with them. They know that it's easier to buy (and return) shoes at a brick-and-mortar store, so they want to remove as many other obstacles as they can.
American Airlines, on the other hand, is not in a competitive market. They've split the market with Delta, United, and Continental. They don't have to care about the customer. They know that as long as they're not significantly more or less terrible than the other three carriers, the average consumer isn't going to stick to his or her principles at the cost of a less convenient or more expensive flight. In addition, the airline business has sufficiently high barriers to entry that they don't have to worry about a competitor springing up and devouring their business overnight. That's the real reason American Airlines doesn't care about its customers. It's also the same reason that, e.g. Comcast and Verizon don't have great customer service either. Simply put, they're not forced to, so they don't.
Part of this is just how the market works: if you want to fly on a jet airplane across a continent for a couple hundred bucks, expect a McDonald's level of competency. Airlines are in a perpetual race to the bottom, and the result is cheap travel at the cost of customer service.
Zappos can do it because they have HUGE profit margins on luxury/unique products, and those margins pay for customer service.
Whereas AA can't because they have negligible profit margins on a completely price-sensitive hightly competitive landscape
I emailed a few days later and explained the situation. Without a delay, they refunded the $50, then gave me and my travel companion $100 vouchers for the hassle.
It wasn't even their fault -- SFO was having weird tech issues.
Furthermore, the company cannot just allow customer reps to 'bend a policy here, [...] expedite an order there, [...] bubble an issue up to a manager'. If you give them the freedom to bend policies, they can choose to draw their own lines and that can result in adverse effects for the company overall. Bending of rules is too risky for a large company to allow their customer reps to take. It's a slippery slope, but honestly one that doesn't seem to have much of a solution.