Southwest Airlines has been on the cutting edge in domestic air travel many times. Now, I believe they’ve fallen over the edge. In the interest of making life easier, the bureaucrats over at Southwest have managed to complicate everything. I first heard that they were no longer going to allow families with small children to board first (read it here). Allowing them boarding privileges was helpful because traveling with little ones causes lots of unintentional delays—especially when trying to get down the tiny aisles on airplanes. But in the wisdom of the ages, the pointy-heads at Southwest have decided that boarding will go faster if they just let everyone crowd on like cattle into a chute.

This morning I head about this. Basically, Southwest has decided to keep their “open seating” policy, saving the headache of attendants clicking a few keys to assign a seat—oh, and think of all the printer ink it saves, too. Southwest also saves money in boarding passes, by handing out groupings with plastic, reusable passes. Now, to simplify matters, since parents with small children don’t get to board first, along with your color group you’ll get a number, and passengers get seated numerically as well as by color.

Here’s my question: how is this really easier than assigning seats and boarding by rows?