The Pecan Park Eagle

What Price Old Glory? Ask the Motels of Greater Cape Canaveral!

The 2005 World Series replay starts tonight and starts reporting tomorrow, one game a day in real-time until it’s done, but I had to report on this little extra discovery while it was still current and the juices were still flowing.

My young adult son Neal has been a NASA devotee forever. He has been planning to squeeze in an auto trip over there to watch this last launch live for several months in between semesters at UH, where he is now enrolled as a part-time working college student. The timing and financing of the trip were all on him – and he had to make his plans too in the knowledge that delays in the launch could result in him making the trip and still missing the launch.

One piece of advice Neal didn’t take from me was to check on motel prices in advance and make reservations somewhere nearby, if possible. He didn’t want to do that. I think he got it into his head that, if he made reservations in advance, and then couldn’t go, for whatever reason, that he would lose money he could not afford to lose. The worst we both figured might happen is that he would get down there and find that there was no room in the inn and be forced to drive a hundred miles away to find a room.

Well, that’s happened, all right. Neal left Houston Tuesday. Today, Thursday, he is currently driving south from Cape Canaveral, looking for a room, but not for the reasons we suspected might be at play. They have plenty of rooms available in the great launch area for those who can afford the price gouge that’s at play. Neal tried checking in to a Super * in Titusville, Florida that normally charges $69 a night. This week, however, because of the “last launch” the local Super 8 is asking for $279 a night.

Price gouging is the death rattle for local motel chains as they face the end of NASA’s space launch programs. It won’t stop NASA from shutting down as it is envisioned by the Obama Administration, but it will be the motel operators’ last chance to stick it to the American public before these capitalists move on to some other basis for attracting travelers to their area.

What gets me is not the supply/demand factor in price setting. Like all of you, I’ve lived with that axis of our system all my life, What gets me in this instance is that these businesses are taking advantage of the NASA patriotic public under these circumstances of special demand. Like my son, many of the people coming to their area to see the last launch are not rich. They are there to show their support for an active NASA Mission program. Price gouge for Super Bowls and diva concerts all you want, friends, but don’t take out either your greed or vindictiveness  on patriots, which is pretty much how I see the people jamming the area to watch the last launch. It should have been enough to have filled all their rooms at some price near their norm.

Of course, it took legislation to keep some businesses from doing this same thing to victims of hurricanes and other disasters a few years ago. The appetite of greed seems to have no limits.

Thanks for giving me the space here to get that off my chest, friends. “Taking advantage of others because you can” is a behavior that has always riled my blood. I don’t like it in this instance – and other examples are endless. For example, I especially don’t like it when I learn of doctors who perform the same procedures or prescribe the same medications for most of their patients. These actions have to make you wonder: Is the doctor doing this for his patient? Or is he doing it because that’s how he covers his expenses and makes a living?

I prefer to think the best of other people in general, but it doesn’t always happen – and $279 a night for a Super 8 room in Titusville, Florida sure doesn’t help me trust the people behind this sorry scam.

UPDATE, 8:55 PM, Thursday, July 7, 2011: Neal found a room at the Campbell Motel in Cocoa, Florida, about 20 miles south of Titusville. Their normal $55 a night rooms were going for only $95 a night this special week. It was an encouraging note. When Neal told the independent small place innkeeper of his experience elsewhere with pricing for similar accommodations near $290 a night, the Indian woman who checked him into the Campbell Motel said: “I don’t stay in business by robbing the people.”

Now there’s an innkeeper I really like.

Tags: NASA Essay

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