My advice to him is 'grow up'. The attendant hadn't been subjected to anything that kids in a tough high school have been through.

Why should anybody have to put up at work with things kids in a tough high school have been through? What kind of comparison is that at all? It's apples and ping pong balls.

gnu: just as a point of information, not picking on you, they don't repack those, they throw them away. Once that genie is out of the bottle there's no stuffing it back in.

And now people make the same trip in a few hours and bitch about the snacks.

People bitch about a lot more than snacks. And it doesn't matter a rat's patoot how long it took in 1856 or whatever. What matters is people being treated poorly by companies they have paid for a service. And people's treatment by airlines has gone downhill in a handcart over the last 30 years. Did you see United Breaks Guitars? Would he have been given such a holy runaround 30 years ago if United broke his guitar? Like hell! People are treated like cattle to be milked by the airlines, and when people complain about it, folks like you tell them to shut up and deal. Why should they? Why should people stand to be treated the way airlines treat us? It's not just the snacks and implying so is dirty pool.