While plane rides are very dull and annoying, there's always SkyMall. For the past 25 years, Skymall has sat in that back compartment of your chair and provided lesiurely reading and novelty gifts to peruse. You never know what you'll find in an issue of SkyMall. That might come to and end soon, however, as SkyMall's parent company Xhibit has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to the Wall Street Journal.
SkyMall purchases have substantially decreased in the last few years, and company Chief Executive Scott Wiley believes that the rise of the mobile-phone-as-entertainment provider is to blame.
"With the increased use of electronic devices on planes, fewer people browsed the SkyMall in-flight catalog," he said. "[This] resulted in additional competition from e-commerce retailers and additional competition for the attention of passengers, all of which further negatively impacted SkyMall's catalog sales."
While Xhibit has declared bankruptcy, it doesn't mean that SkyMall is necessarily done as a company. The SkyMall brand could be bought out by another company and revamped in the near future. After all, how else would Bigfoot statue makers and kitty litter robot inventors sell their products? But for now, the publisher's resources will be limited.
SkyMall was founded in 1990 as a way for customers to order goods while on flights and deliver it to an arriving passenger's home on the same day or to be picked up at the airport. However, that model was a failure for the company, which eventually turned to printing catalogs that sold third-party products to fliers.
