Law of unintended consequences

Remember this debate about Spirit Airlines' decision to start charging for carry-on bags, and Charles Schumer's effort to outlaw the practice? Here is what I said:

Spirit Airlines is proposing a fee for carry on baggage, and says that their ticket price will be reduced by about the same amount as the fee. This makes perfect sense - a traveler who walks on with no carry on luggage probably costs much less than someone who tries to jam a large suitcase into an overhead bin. I imagine the extra cost from additional boarding time alone, over the course of thousands of flights, is astronomical.

Well, the policy went into effect on August 1st, and I flew on Spirit on July 29th, three days before the policy was instituted, and flew home on Spirit Airlines yesterday, August 4th. This was what happened on the way home after the new policy was instituted:





I can't believe I hadn't thought of this, but when you require passengers to pay for carry on bags, the number of people that have to go through the baggage check-in line increases substantially. The wait time was an hour. To fix this problem, the airline is going to have to hire more people for check in, which will increase their costs. Otherwise, they are going to be losing customers not because of any carry-on baggage fee, but because of long wait times. No, I can't prove that this was the reason for the lines. Maybe it was because it was August, which is the busy season for the Jersey Shore, but I have to believe that this was at least a contributing factor, and another example of the law of unintended consequences.

Maybe Chuck Schumer won't have anything to worry about after all. Maybe the marketplace will work it's magic and this will not become the industry norm.