It needs to be easier to travel in this country. 

I won’t even bore you with the gory details. All I know is that as bad as I had it since last Thursday, at least I don’t work for Delta in the Minneapolis airport. Those poor people.

I’ve had worse air travel experiences, some of them self-inflicted, like the time I dropped my 50-pound suitcase on the head of an elderly woman. Or the time I was sitting next to a chatty supermodel on a flight from Berlin, came back from the lavatory with sink water (I swear) on my tan slacks, and spent the next 5 hours pretending to read the airline magazine on my lap. 

If you’ve ever befriended anyone who’s ultra-wealthy – particularly anyone with public notoriety – a little part of you pities them. Everybody wants something from them, whether it’s a donation or investment or mooching off the perks or being able to humble-brag about being friends with a rich and famous person. Once you reach a certain level of wealth, it’s hard to trust anyone around you. It’s enough to wonder whether you’d trade with them. 

Except for their planes. Those lucky bastards.

We make it too hard to get around. In Europe, you can hit any of six different countries on a weekend for 100 USD. It costs three times that much to fly from Pittsburgh to Detroit. Also, we need high-speed rail here. Tomorrow.

I could go on about how frictionless, affordable travel in America would ease our political strife, giving people exposure to others of different views and cultures, a broader sense of national and global community, empathy, etc. I write enough about that stuff.

For now, I’d just like for our family to visit my in-laws for less than $2,000 (or 28 hours of driving) or take a short business trip without wondering if I (or my golf clubs) will ever make it home. A 200mph train to New York and Chicago would improve my quality of life beyond belief. 

Instead, as pissed as I am at Delta, I have no choice but to get on another one of their planes next week, then again a week later, and again a week after that. It’s a hostage situation.

Wish me luck.

Here’s what we’re seeing:

At least I wasn’t alone. Whilst I was stranded in the Twin Cities (a lovely place to be marooned, incidentally), our team was busy studying the impact of the CrowdStrike outage among U.S. consumers. Over 1-in-4 claim to have been adversely affected by the shit show in one way or another. Over 1-in-3 air travelers were impacted, the majority of those en route to vacation spots. Bigger picture, the ordeal significantly heightened Americans’ concerns for the security of our technology infrastructure. Clearly, if one faulty software update can cause this much havoc, I hate to think what a more deliberate attack could do. 

I suppose you have to admire Elon Musk for his convictions – unless you’re a Tesla investor. Brand favorability toward Tesla among left-leaning Americans plummeted this month after Musk’s enthusiastic endorsement of Donald Trump, although it had already been sliding steadily since January. A modest uptick among Republicans did little to stave off the overall decline. The obvious problem is that EV enthusiasts skew heavily Democrat, given their more tech-savvy, pro-climate, anti-fossil fuel disposition. Republicans, particularly Trump-zealots, are more likely to sneer at EVs in the first place. Whatever quantifiable impact Musk’s endorsement has on Tesla sales long-term remains to be seen. But I can’t imagine it will help. (PS – We got a ton of great press for this data this week in Forbes, NPR, and Yahoo Finance, among others).

Gen Z is changing the future of news, if also bringing it back to the past. I was surprised when I asked our girls, after reading this study, whether they buy any news subscriptions online, to hear them both say ‘yes.’ They’re not exactly outliers either, as 44% of Gen Z pays for at least one online content subscription, outpacing every other age group. When it comes to breaking news, Gen Z is a mixture of new school – a plurality turns first to social media, and old school – a local news outlet is a close second and climbing. National network and cable news channels are in precipitous decline. Meanwhile, they’re turning away from political news in droves.

Buy Now, Pay Later services would be even more popular (among current users) if they improved credit scores. In our 3 Things to Know this week, we explored whether people would be more likely to use BNPL if account activity was reported to credit bureaus (some services do, most don’t). The results are a mixed bag. Among past/current users, over half say they would use the services more if they showed up on their credit history. Among non-users, credit impact would be a deterrent by over 2-to-1. In other news, we looked at the rising and unsurprising concern over political violence in America over the last two weeks, the continued decline of personal checks, and the rise of credit cards as a primary form of payment among U.S. consumers.

The Olympics remains the one major sporting event that isn’t personality-driven. Our family totally geeks out over the Olympics – it will dominate our TVs for the next 2+ weeks. As a die-hard gymnastic family, Simone Biles’ quest for immortality tops our much-watch list, but we’ll tune into any event we can find. While every other popular sport you can think of is driven by the star power of its athletes, the Olympics remains a team-first spectacle (if slightly less so than in Olympics past). Seventy-five percent of viewers say they’re tuning in for specific events, while 25% are following specific athletes. Related, national pride ranks as the number one reason people are buying Olympics merch. But, yeah, Simone is still drawing eyeballs.

More awesomeness from the InsightStore™:

The most popular questions this week: 

How comfortable are you with public displays of affection?

Do you ever wish dragons were real?

Does Ryan Reynolds seem like someone you’d be friends with?

Real estate reality shows: into them or over them?

Are you more of a beer, wine, or coffee drinker?

Answer Key: All for it; Hell yeah; Sure; Never watched one; Yes.

Hoping you’re well.

JD

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