Alaska Airlines still uses the classic
paper boarding pass paper stock at San Francisco airport and (looks to me) a main-frame program to print the details. The ELECTRONIC only means the ticket is electronic. (I’m old enough to remember the days when the gate attendant would rip off the top part of a paper ticket and hand the carbon copy below it back to the passenger). I could certainly go with an electronic boarding pass as well : the square bar code from the Alaska Airlines app on my mobile phone. But with the paper boarding pass I can ‘scoff’ at (scoff back at?) the tech geeks fresh from doing business in Silicon Valley, that fly back to Seattle with me. I read in my Bloomberg Businessweek that paper coupons for packaged goods at the grocery store and elsewhere are thriving – even in this age of smartphones and electronics. People just love to clip them out and take them to the store. Will paper ever go away completely? Not any time soon.
