of late one of these brochures has come with the sunday new york times and it almost seems they are relics of the past...i cannot really think of an industry that will suffer more from the pandemic than cruise lines ( with the possible exceptions of restaurants and air lines )...after the stories of shipboard quarantines...governments refusing to allow the liners to dock...people paying exorbitant fare fro flights home to avoid being stranded...one supposes most right thinking people would avoid a cruise ship like the plague..and rightly so...i would also assume that a cruise line is an expensive business to run...maintenance, staff, logistics from food to fuel...complex organizational issues and costs everywhere...still...the cheapest fare in this brochure is $7199.00 for one person and the most expensive is $82499 a pop...really? almost a hundred grand for a couple of weeks on a boat? luxury or not that seems more like expropriation than a fare...the presumption seems to be that arrogant wealth would pony up to engage in veblenesque consumption...something to tell the folks back home about and to show their elite superiority to the hoi polloi...after YOU couldn't afford it...like wearing a watch that costs more than my house...designed to assert some sort of social superiority...more like hubris...and we all know where that leads...and the ones who will suffer most from this collapse..the crews...the service providers...the lower castes...the elite may take a shot to their portfolios...it's the crews that will starve or be reduced to penury...the elite will, unfortunately, survive...needn't waste empathy...or even sympathy for that matter...on them...save your energy.
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