Panic! At the Airport Lounge
Something devastating is happening to airport lounges, and those paid to catalog subtle economic and cultural shifts are taking note.
The food? “Sad.” The walls? “Beige.” The seating? “Overcrowded.” Wealth management professional, author, and now two-time The Money with Katie Show guest Nick Maggiulli recently analyzed wealth data he believes underlies this phenomenon: “The upper middle class is getting too big,” and as a result, much like David Mack titled his weekend op-ed for the Times, “When Everybody Has Airport Lounge Access, Nobody Does.” This is because wealth and access are, at bottom, about a sense of exclusivity and hierarchy—so if everybody’s rich, no one is.
Nerdwallet
I suppose I’m more attuned to airport lounge discourse than your average reader because the airport lounge, that mythic land of cushioned chairs and free stuff, played a remarkably outsized role in my financial bildungsroman. In a now-defunct blog post from 2019, I described the thrilling glory of obtaining a Platinum Card® from American Express, whose titanium facade granted me access to its haughty Centurion Lounge. I referred to it as my “guest pass to the lifestyles of people who can actually afford the things I’ve rented with a high annual fee.”
A then-stranger to the comforts of the comfort class, I wrote about how “taking the elevator from the Auntie Anne’s-scented chaos of the general terminal area into the faux greenery-shrouded privacy of the Centurion Lounge reception area felt like clicking my Platinum slippers three times and yeeting myself into a dimension where people sported blowouts and tasseled shoes to wearily sip gratis mimosas at the airport. Because I had to hack and loophole my way into these spaces, their natural inhabitants fascinated me.
“Even within a space like this one, class exists,” I reflected. “It’s fairly obvious who lives the Centurion Lounge lifestyle outside the Centurion Lounge, too, and who bit the bullet for a credit card that just enabled the brief glimpse of affluence as a bookend experience to a vacation (i.e., me).” At the time, I earned approximately $60,000 per year, which meant the card’s then-$550 annual fee represented nearly 1% of my annual gross pay. Since I was publishing to an audience of approximately no one, I recorded the impressions this experience left on me in blisteringly honest fashion: “The Centurion Lounge is a taste of the way the other half lives all the time, and I find it tantalizing—it’s really the only time my lifestyle intersects with theirs. I want the lounge experience outside the lounge. I want to approach my day of travel as leisurely and comfortably as the woman who looked almost bored by her complimentary omelet. That was the strangest part about ‘the haves’ in the Centurion Lounge: Most of them didn’t even look excited to be there.”
And it’s not just a growing upper middle class crowding your nearest Priority Pass lair; whatever spatial stratification the luxury airport lounge offered 10 years ago, The Wall Street Journal says, “flying on a private jet” accomplishes today, “the luxury that separates the 1% from the 0.1%.” Flying private is becoming more popular, Gunjan Banerji writes, “as soaring stocks and crypto prices mint more millionaires and billionaires, who now have a range of choices to book a seat on a jet.” The rich are getting richer, as they say, and there are many businesses eager to supply them with experiences that reinforce their sensation of ascension. In just the last 10 years, the billionaires have swelled their ranks by 50%. One such private flyer lamented to the Journal that he noticed hangars for private planes around the country “growing more crowded.” Is nowhere safe from the unwashed masses?
But back to my pretentious travel perk of choice, the lounge: The argument that many of these articles mount is that these spaces are too crowded because too many people can afford to be in them now. The card companies keep hiking the annual fees; people keep paying them. Guest policies are increasingly arcane and limiting; it doesn’t seem to make a difference. The food really does seem worse. If you’ve been paying attention to the more ubiquitous “cost-of-living crisis” economic story, the alternate reality that Maggiulli and the Journal are describing might feel implausible. How could it be that there are more rich people with excess discretionary income than ever before, flooding airport lounges and forcing the truly rich to elope the hellish experience of plebeian travelers altogether by chartering their own planes? But the apparent contradiction belies a more sophisticated trend in American economic life. To understand it, we must first revisit the nascent Money with Katie, stuffing cookies into her carry-on in DFW’s Centurion.
It was around the time of my first visit to American Express’s den of inequity in 2019 that I was introduced to the FI/RE movement. I lacked any knowledge of “historical materialism” and had only vague, McCarthyist knee-jerk reactions to the word “Marxism” after a lifetime in the American education system, but FI/RE’s basic premise—that you are not free nor independent if you must sell your time and labor for money—resonated deeply. The sheer desperation of job-hunting as the final days of my summer internship ticked down still felt raw in my nervous system. With a little over $1,000 in checking and my Social Security number obliged to a freshly signed lease, the prospect of employment consumed me spiritually. After I scored said job, it consumed me temporally—it felt as though I was always getting ready for work, driving to work, at work, sitting in traffic after work, or decompressing after work. While I figured the rhythm of 40 years of unpunctuated 40-hour work weeks would take some adjustment, it was clear that, in adulthood, the vast majority of my waking hours and mental capacity would be consumed by one thing.
For young Americans interested in esoteric theories of money and freedom, curiosity about Karl Marx’s writings on the political economy can be layered. One part of the appeal is less sophisticated, and should be obvious to anyone who’s ever been into punk rock or doing something because their parents told them not to—culturally forbidden and taboo ideas will always be more innately alluring than those taught by the elbow-patched gatekeepers at the Chicago School of Economics. Who doesn’t love a bad boy? But secondly and more importantly, Marx supplied a philosophical framework that closely aligns with that of the FI/RE movement. Much like Americans, Marx was obsessed with the concept of freedom. In Karl Marx in America, Andrew Hartman writes that “to read Marx is to wrestle with the world made by capitalism,” especially in the United States, “because capitalism is arguably the single most important feature of American life.”
The basic premise of a Marxist interpretation of capitalism is simple, in that it divides society into two fundamental groups: those who work to make things more valuable, and those who own the things being made more valuable. In this conception, both the “middle class” and “upper middle class” are mirages that have the useful effect of aligning a portion of the working class psychologically with the ownership class. But in a Marxist formulation, there are only two real classes: those who must work for money, and those for whom money works. “As the source of value in a capitalist economy,” Hartman writes, “labor must be disciplined to maximize profit. Workers in a capitalist society cannot be completely free.” This is because Marx’s theory of freedom “required that people have independence over their work, over their time, over their bodies. Since most people in a capitalist society lack such self-rule and must sell their labor to survive, capitalism is incompatible with freedom.”
In that sense, FI/RE is inherently Marxist in its perspective on labor, capital, and freedom, but it consolidates the philosophy into actionable, individual advice. It doesn’t advise working-class uprising—it prescribes VTSAX. It says (rightly) that some portion of the working class will be able to buy its way into ownership via shares of the public market, real estate, or business ownership; that you can theoretically minimize your consumption and maximize your output for some duration of years to create your very own “surplus value” that can be deployed to squirrel away tiny bits of capital over time.
Our entire retirement system in the United States—excepting Social Security, a universal contributory pension—is premised on this same concept, a tacit admission of what Marx long theorized: To be truly free, one must own their time, and the only way to own your time is to become an owner of things that other people are making more valuable. After 40-odd years as a laborer with access to a handy little tool called a 401(k), you can (theoretically) buy enough ownership to transcend labor entirely and live on your accumulated capital. FI/RE just turns this path into an extreme sport.
It’d be one thing if everyone in society faced this same challenge from the same starting line, but in a world where inheritances are both common and virtually untaxed, it is quite obviously not so. Questions of fairness sidelined, the impossibility of the proposition reveals itself when no such “surplus value” exists at the personal level. If your wages are so low that you can’t afford to make ends meet, let alone save enough to accumulate capital, you are trapped in a situation that is, mechanically speaking, not altogether different from debt peonage or servitude. In this humble Platinum Cardholder’s estimation, based on cost-of-living trends, wage distribution, and inflated asset prices, somewhere between 25% and 50% of Americans find themselves in this situation—and much like the so-called “upper middle class,” their ranks are growing.
This “two classes” lens provides a more useful framework for understanding the growing hordes of lounge-goers or private fliers amid last year’s Pew Research report on the state of the middle class, which showed the middle portion of the distribution compressing as more Americans moved out of the middle and into the lower or upper classes of the distribution. This is not a story of “everyone” becoming richer, nor is “everyone” falling behind—because these simultaneous, seemingly competing economic narratives aren’t contradictory, but complementary. This is not an aberration—it’s a return. As the artificial, mid-twentieth century government construction of the middle class slowly evaporates, we’re quietly reverting to two classes. (If ole’ Karl were here, he’d probably say this has been the case all along.)
Normally, discussion of this data revolves around the critique that, even after running the data sets through the Rosetta Stone of “2023 dollars,” the disproportionately high costs of housing, education, and healthcare mean even “upper middle class” income and wealth don’t seem as expansive or bountiful as they were once presumed to feel. (This is the thesis of Magguilli’s piece and what he interpreted with the analogy of an overcrowded airport lounge.) For comment, I turn to 2019 Katie, fresh off a trip to DFW and wondering aloud to her readership of zero: “Do luxury and comfort become blasé over time? Do you eventually become so accustomed to your every need being met and every whim being catered to that a truly exceptional experience becomes the default? I don’t know, but experiencing life in the Centurion Lounge made me determined to find out.”
What’s revealing here isn’t the hedonic treadmill of luxury, but how a loose approximation of it can function like a temporary release valve for this collapsing middle. The lounge is less an escape from the rest of the airport and more a repackaged version of it, with mood lighting and Sauvignon blanc to make what is ultimately the same experience go down a little easier.
I’m in a different financial position now than I was back then, when I pinballed down the narrow corridors of the DFW Centurion pointing at the futuristic espresso machines and phone nooks shouting, “Thomas, look at this!” But lately, my preferred pre-flight routine has completed its 360-degree revolution around the terminal. Now, finding myself drawn to something else “sad, beige, and overcrowded,” I grab a six-piece McNugget, a small fry, and two small reservoirs of honey mustard, and I wait at the gate with the rest of the proletariat. I feel like I’ve finally arrived.
