Quality generally with many manufactured goods. There are health and safety regulations but if there were a requirement for a 20-year warranty (which is about what my Aeron chair has) both quality and prices would probably increase significantly.

In the opposite direction, you're not actually allowed to generally buy a car without modern safety features. (Although automakers do make cars that are have higher or lower safety ratings within the regulatory framework.)

A common thread is that when push comes to shove, a lot of consumers will choose the lower price.

The straight-to-landfill consumer goods make me sad, but I guess I can buy cheaper tires and only drive in ideal conditions so there can be a place for middling quality.

Or tools for the occasional household use. You might not want junk but that table saw you use maybe a handful of times a year may not have to be as high-end as what a carpenter might use most days.

Which would be fine if you could tell if you could actually reliably find high quality products. But I'm increasingly finding it difficult to distinguish between paying more for quality and paying more for overpriced junk.

The 'Project Farm' reviews on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectFarm) really have been eye-opening for me in that regard; sometimes there is still a strong correlation between price and quality but half the time the best quality (not just price to quality ratio -- subjective or otherwise) ends up clustering in decidedly interesting places.

The market in question was airlines. US airlines have rather a lot of competitors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airlines_of_the_United...

How many does Boeing have?

Luggage. Airlines make quite a bit hauling cargo on passenger flights so they are essentially subsidizing seats as long as people don’t check bags and charging inflated prices when they do.

Convenience especially in terms of number of flights. This gets into a bunch of economic and logistical issues, but airlines are happy to abandon less profitable areas. While regulators want regular service even if the demand isn’t quite there

Service. The minimum number of attendants is based on safety, airlines would happily cut those workers.

Safety.

free luggage, free meals (on shorter flights), legroom, time on the ground and flight cancelation headaches (far less of a problem if you don't offer connecting flights like Ryanair).

If you get all of these right, price decreases, demand increases, average seat occupancy goes way up, and that causes the per-seat price to drop even more, in a feedback loop. If your costs are low enough, you can go for a direct model instead of a hub-and-spoke model, catering more towards casual travelers who just want to go somewhere instead of the business types which need to go from X to Y at time Z, no matter the cost. THe direct model drives the cost down even more, as you only need one flight instead of two, and don't have to worry about the insane costs of passengers stranded at your hub when something goes wrong.