It is pretty rare that two of my biggest passions (gum and travel) converge in something worth blogging about (imo, obviously). However, on a recent layover at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, I discovered (to my extreme dismay) that they do not sell gum in this important hub.
Schiphol is the 9th busiest airport in the world; 125,000 people go through the airport everyday, and you cannot buy gum there.
Instead of gum, I had to get mints.
The reason? According to the bored kiosk attendant who I interrogated, it was costing too much in cleaning time to scrape the gum off the floors and furniture, so they banned the sale of it. You can still chew in the airport – if you knew you had to buy it before hand.
I imagine someone did a cost analysis and discovered that the revenue made from selling gum in Schiphol (which I conservatively calculate to be somewhere around, $1.8M USD** per year), was less than the costs associated with cleaning up the gum.
**(My calculation is based on Palm Beach Airport stats, the only airport which had gum figures available. They had 6m passengers in 2010 and reported gum revenue as $225,000 per year)
I understand its tough business to run an airport these days – and if you were loosing money on gum, its logical not to sell it.
But this doesn’t solve my problem, so here is my suggestion: sell the gum in duty free, get it sealed up in those permanent ziplock baggy things and deliver it to gate, just the same as whiskey or mascara. The airport concessions make the revenue, the passengers ears don’t pop and the mess becomes the airlines problem. I sent an email with this suggestion to Schiphol – I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.
PS: There was surprisingly little written about this issue on the Internets. And when I say little, I mean, nothing. But I learnt a lot of other interesting things when I googled “No Gum at Schiphol,” such as:
- The #6 result on Google was a Wikipedia article on the “Urinal.” Why? Well, wouldn’t you know that Schiphol airport was the first place to put fly targets in urinals (I didn’t even know that was a thing until I read this entry). The cleaning crews found a significant reduction in cleaning time after the fly was introduced.
- GUM is the Airport code for Guam. There are no direct flights from Schiphol to Guam.
- You also cannot buy gum at DisneyLand or Sydney airport.
- At Schiphol the baggage handlers are robots
- Finally, you can get married at Schiphol.
Urinal Fly.
UPDATE!!! Max from Schiphol wrote back to me – ten points to Schiphol! Which I should add, besides the gum is a pretty great airport:
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Dear Mrs. Martin,
Thank you for your mail. We are glad to hear, that you love our airport. This means that our efforts to improve the airport are successful.
It gets messy if we sell gum at Schiphol. Visitors just spit out their gum on the floor and it is difficult to remove. We do not think that the revenue of gum sales compensates the costs of removal. Moreover, it is not a pretty sight, all those black spots on the floor.
Our no-gum policy has proven to be useful, so we will stick to it.
We hope we have informed you sufficiently. Yours sincerely,
AMSTERDAM AIRPORT SCHIPHOL Business Area Aviation
Max Huwae
Customer Contact Centre |
