Why your airport burger costs that much

You can get almost anything at the airport in 2024. But it’s going to cost you.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Warped Airport Logic

A $30 hamburger. A $7 coffee. A $38 shower (yes, some airports have showers now). The modern airport offers a cornucopia of overpriced delights for the modern traveler.

An obvious reason that airport vendors get away with these prices is that airline travelers are a captive audience—often a bored and thirsty one too. But airport vendors also charge what they do because of the peculiar cost of doing business there. Once you step through an airport’s sliding doors, you enter a new reality—or, as Emily Stewart wrote in Vox in 2022, a “sort of economic twilight zone where the cost of anything and everything goes up.”

The cost of retail space in the airport can run unusually high, Blaise Waguespack, an expert on airport management at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University, told me, and spaces come with extra costs. Vendors may need to pay for employee badges, transportation to the airport, and parking. The operating challenges are meaningful too: Getting food through its version of airport security (which needs to happen frequently, because storage inside the airport is limited) is trickier than simply delivering goods in town.

But although it can feel like no price is out of the question, airports do technically have guidelines for what vendors should charge. Many airport vendors charge “street” or “street plus” pricing, typically capped at about 10 percent more than the cost of nearby establishments, Waguespack told me—though what a given area’s street cost is can be subjective. Some mid-tier places end up charging upscale prices. And airport restaurants have, in many places, gone genuinely upscale: More and more fine-dining and name-brand establishments are coming to America’s airports, bringing nicer food but also normalizing heftier checks.

In the early days of air travel, people didn’t really care about high airport prices, Janet Bednarek, an airport historian at the University of Dayton, told me in an email. “Well into the 1970s, most of the people who flew were affluent and thus not highly price sensitive,” she explained, and in the decades that followed, expensive food became the norm. In the 1990s, however, when BAA (formerly the British Airports Authority) began managing retail at the Pittsburgh airport, it brought European standards with it, including that vendors needed to charge prices similar to those at outside stores. “This was revolutionary and for a time did bring prices down,” Bednarek said.

But after 9/11, the economics of airport food, like so much else about flying, transformed. “The necessity of security measures meant that hiring became harder and more expensive for merchants,” Bednarek told me. The way people approached their time in the airport also changed, and some restaurants lost business. “It is hard to remember, but before 9/11 non-passengers could come to the airport and hang out,” she said. People waited around for loved ones to land, or even just watched planes go by. A series of post-9/11 shifts, Bednarek explained, combined with the more recent disruptions of COVID-19 and inflation, have kept prices high.

What’s a traveler to do? Is there some sort of hack to avoid an upcharge on your chicken tenders? When I asked Katy Nastro, a spokesperson for the travel company Going, her response boiled down to: not really. “Try to avoid eating at the airport altogether,” she advised in an email. Pack your own food, she recommended, unless you have a luxurious lounge to take advantage of.

The volume of flights that have been delayed lately means that people sometimes have lots of time to kill at the airport. Once you cross the threshold from normal life into travel mode, it can be easy to start relying on warped airport logic. An extra 30 minutes? Consider a fancy cocktail. An extra hour? Consider a massage. Three extra hours? Consider a three-course meal and two more drinks to pass the time. There’s not a lot people can do to resist, besides opting out altogether. So why not just pack a turkey sandwich instead and watch the planes go by?

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P.S.

As Stewart’s article reminded me, back in the 1990s, America’s great chronicler of lifestyle inconveniences addressed the high cost of airport fare: In a Seinfeld bit, the titular character asks, “Do you think that the people at the airport that run the stores have any idea what the prices are every place else in the world? Or do you think they just feel they have their own little country out there and they can charge anything they want?” It’s a fair question. Although it’s not its own country, it does have its own name—experts tell me that the space past the scanners is called “airside.” I hope you have a good and reasonably priced journey if you will be venturing airside in the coming holiday week!

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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