Happy Thanksgiving! Hopefully, you’re already where you are planning to be today or don’t have that far to go. If you’re flying to or from Charlotte Douglas in the next few days, brace yourself. The airport says this Sunday could be the busiest day in CLT's history. For more, we turn now to Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: So just how busy are we talking here, Tony?
Tony Mecia: Marshall, we're talking pretty busy. You know, the last few days before Thanksgiving, there’s been some pretty big crowds out there trying to get into the airport. You know, maybe some of it was the bad weather. But, you know, people were waiting 20-30 minutes, you know, to get from Wilkinson in to pick people up by the terminal.
Today should be a little bit slower. But you know, this weekend is really supposed to pick back up again. And, like you mentioned, Sunday they think they could have the busiest day ever in Charlotte airport history, surpassing the previous record of about 40,000 passengers clearing security. You know, travel has largely come back after the pandemic and come back with the vengeance. The airport’s passenger traffic is already ahead of where it was in 2019 on a year-to-date basis, and they think this will be the busiest year ever. And, certainly, Sunday could set some records.
Terry: Now this is happening amid ongoing construction at the airport, right? And I saw photos of people walking to the airport, dragging their luggage Tuesday night. How bad is the road situation there?
Mecia: They've completed a lot of the road work in there, and they're still working on the terminal. They're still working on Concourse A. I think the last few days have been a combination of the weather and large crowds. It's not like there are massive lane closures going into the airport, but it's certainly something you're going to want to build in some extra time if you're headed there.
Terry: Well, let's switch now from turkey talk to chicken talk. You report Charlotte-based Bojangles is testing new artificial intelligence to take drive-thru orders and have dubbed her Bo-Linda. So, is this the AI revolution we were promised? Do we really need AI to order Bo-Berry biscuits?
Mecia: Well, I don't know if we need it. Most people are used to having people greet them through the drive-thru. Maybe they're sometimes hard to understand, and maybe they don't always get the orders right. Bojangles is testing this. They're in 10 different stores right now. They say the early results are promising, that the results tend to be accurate. You know, this all comes against the backdrop of low unemployment rates. We've heard employers saying for a long time that they have trouble hiring people for all kinds of jobs. And, so, any kind of labor-saving device that you can employ, I think businesses are trying them out. So, I think this is just an example of that. You know, you go into some restaurants and they have kiosks now. They encourage you to use the kiosks instead of talking to a person. This is sort of the drive-thru equivalent, Marshall.
Terry: So are we likely to see it at other fast-food restaurants?
Mecia: It's not maybe appropriate for every single fast-food restaurant. I mean ones that really place a premium on, sort of, the human touch and the human experience — they might not do it. But you know, I think certainly, you know, you could see a day where something like this, you know, takes off in drive-thrus. You know a couple of decades ago, it was probably weird to call someone on the phone and be routed to voice mail, or a system that asks you to press 1 for a dial-by-name directory. But now those things are pretty commonplace. So, you know, it might seem a little bit odd at first, but eventually these things, I think, tend to catch on and nobody thinks twice about them.
Terry: All right. Changing it up now, you report Charlotte's newsletter wars are heating up with the new one set to debut early next year. What can you tell us about 6AM City? And which newsletter will it be in direct competition with?
Mecia: Yes, there are a few national newsletter companies that are really focused on locally-oriented newsletters. The one that most people in Charlotte are familiar with is Axios Charlotte, which used to be Charlotte Agenda. It has about 120,000 people on its email list, but there's another one called 6AM City that is in about 30 cities as well. It says it plans to start a newsletter in Charlotte called CLT Today, with a focus, really, on lifestyle content — on events and uplifting types of stories. They don't really cover politics or crime or anything that they consider to be divisive. But this is part of a larger movement toward newsletters for delivering information locally. The Charlotte Ledger, of course, is mostly a newsletter. WFAE has a number of newsletters, most TV stations and legacy media have newsletters. So this is something that's really sort of taken off.
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