Joel on the failure of Clear:
At this point, and here’s the interesting part, at this point, a rational businessperson would say, “Well, does the Clear idea still make sense if we can’t actually let you skip the screening?”
OK, maybe it still makes sense to charge to skip to the front of the line. Maybe there’s a business model in that.
In that case, though, why did they still do background checks? It doesn’t make any sense.
The environment changed. It turns out that Clear’s business model of prescreening wasn’t going to be possible. But they kept doing it anyway. What kind of organizational dysfunction does it take to completely ignore the changed circumstances and keep at a money-losing business?
Except for the most frequent travelers, I don’t even think it made sense to pay just to be able to skip the line. Since the National Guard got out of the airport security business I’ve had exactly one long wait for screening and that was on a Friday evening — something perfectly predictable for the route I was flying. If you can avoid the worst travel times, and barring any airport SNAFUs, the wait for screening just isn’t that bad.
That said, with a purported 250,000+ members I don’t see how they couldn’t manage to turn a profit despite the money wasted on pointless background checks. My state requires fingerprinting, a state-level background check, and an FBI background check to issue a concealed weapons permit and those fees are much less than what Clear charged. And the issuing agency generates a surplus…
