Success Quote by Gerard Arpey

“Markets that don't work we're going to step away from” is corporate plain-speech doing two jobs at once: signaling discipline to investors and sending a quiet warning to everyone else in the ecosystem.

On the surface, Gerard Arpey frames exit as rational hygiene. The line borrows the authority of the market itself: if a market “doesn’t work,” then leaving isn’t abandonment or failure, it’s prudence. That phrasing dodges blame. It doesn’t say “we can’t compete” or “we made the wrong bet.” It implies the problem is structural - prices, regulation, demand, labor costs, competitive dynamics - and that management is simply refusing to subsidize a bad equation.

The subtext is sharper. “Step away” is gentler than “cut,” “pull out,” or “shutdown,” but the effect is the same: routes get dropped, service shrinks, workers and customers absorb the whiplash. It’s also a bargaining chip. Airlines and other large firms often use the possibility of withdrawal to pressure airports, unions, and regulators: meet our terms, or we’ll redeploy capacity elsewhere. The market “not working” can mean “not working for our margin.”

Context matters because Arpey led American Airlines through an era when legacy carriers were re-learning the hard lesson that scale doesn’t guarantee profitability. Post-deregulation competition, fuel volatility, and relentless fare pressure turned sentimentality into a luxury. The sentence is an ideology in miniature: capital stays mobile; communities stay put. That imbalance is exactly why it lands with a chill.