Take cheese, for example - it's much easier to taste the difference with cheese. I've never had a UK supermarket Comte comparable to a Comte from a cheesemonger, no matter how premium it was advertised.

Or pastries. The only widely distributed supermarket in the UK with what I would consider edible pastries is Waitrose, and not all branches have a decent range. But bakeries in the UK have their own mass-market pathologies.

What really brought the insight home to me was my experience eating in Morocco. There, bread was baked by street vendors - it was always fresh and warm. You have to get lucky with timing to get the same experience in the UK, even if you go to bakeries. I realised we've lost certain qualities of life with our economic setup, and the more I found out about good food, the more I realised that supermarkets and commoditization had created a mechanism that forced me to work much harder to get good food.

Anyway, this isn't directly related to airline seats, but I do think the ratchet effect is real and it shows up in a lot of places.

Maybe that's just the UK? In Germany, many supermarket and discount store chains have recently been outfitting their stores with bakery stations, where you have a somewhat decent chance of actually getting warm rolls.

Also, I've had a pretty good experience with premium products in German supermarkets. I only rarely buy from a premium store (sometimes for cheese, almost never for meat), but when I do, their performance is pretty comparable to supermarket premium lines.

Mind, I was fortunate enough to live in the best baking city in Israel (something like 53 bakeries in a city of 300000 people, plus supermarkets and open street markets), but still.