This is such a pervasive argument also used to justify a lot of bad stuff in tech ("if we don't do it, our competitors will" / "if you don't like it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me").

This is a small world. The US has something like ten major airlines. Eight if you don't count subsidiaries. Someone at the first one made a decision to embrace an exploitative pricing model. And then, someone at the second airline looked at this and thought to themselves, "you know, we're not gonna organize a PR campaign to stigmatize it, we're gonna try the same".

I'd argue there's only three "major" carriers: American, United, and Delta.

The rest, such as Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, Allegiant - are all discount and/or regional airlines.

For example, allegiant flies to most cities secondary airports that are 1-2 hours drive from the city.

Southwest and Alaska are absolutely major carriers. Not the absolute largest perhaps but major. Alaska is certainly not discount, and despite the name is not particularly regional.

The Alaskan problem is they more often have unique routes. Which is great and serves cool stuff, but you can’t always count on it bringing competition to your main flight. Allegiant is similar.

If you're in the western half of the country, Alaska is essentially always a route for wherever you want to go, whether staying west or going east.

If you're already on the east coast and aren't going to the west coast, then Alaska doesn't have a route. So I suppose they are "regional", where the region is about 70% of the country rather than all of it.

You don't have to go to the east coast to have trouble finding them. In St Louis they have a whole 4 flights, and 3 go to the west coast. So yes, absolutely regional. And that's the western side of the midwest. In comparison, Southwest has 55 direct destinations from the same airport. This isn't cherry picking: You have as sparse a route map from Dallas, yet another non trivial city. From there, Southwest has 70+ direct flights.

So yes, still a regional airline if your home base isn't exactly on the west coast.

No, they aren’t. Alaska is slightly more of a major carrier than Southwest, but just barely. It’s the same as Jet Blue, except it has the American partnership for code sharing that helps it have an appearance of better coverage across the US. Yes, it carries more passengers, but that doesn’t put it in the same league as the three majors.

Like Jet Blue, Alaska has a handful of wide bodies (that it got from its Hawaiian acquisition) and does a few international routes on its own metal, but it is an airline you fly domestically and that primarily serves the west coast most effectively.

It’s not a bad airline (it’s also not anything special), but it’s not the equivalent of American, United, or Delta. And that isn’t to say the individual flying experience might not be the same as those carriers, but it’s not the same class of operation as a business. Again, it does a handful of international flights. To me, major means you have an array of wide-body jets and a large international operation. Not a few seasonal routes on its 29 wide-bodies. For comparison, American has a fleet of 137 wide body jets. Delta has 179. United has over 240.

These are not the same.

Southwest is even less of a major carrier. It’s got a lot of marketshare from its previous era focused on selling the idea that it was cheaper than the majors, but it operates one type of jet, has zero wide bodies and its international destinations don’t count.

And while Alaska might have to use American to pad out its network of flights at major hubs and markets, at least it can. Southwest’s design to eschew major hubs means that tou can’t get a lot of direct flights to major cities. If it happens to fly where you travel to, fine, but otherwise you have to look at at least one hop and go to a smaller airport than what you might expect.

> Like Jet Blue, Alaska has a handful of wide bodies

Jetblue doesn’t have widebody aircraft, but they still offer transatlantic connections.

Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them. When prices were uniformly set by the government, there were 11 "trunk" airlines in 1978, 9 regional airlines, and three unregulated intrastate airlines- one was Southwest (flying just in Texas, the other two, Air California and PSA, were just in California). Those 23 airlines are now down basically to the Big 4 plus 3 little ones (Alaska, Jet Blue, Frontier). Airline tickets were more expensive- well, the prices were about the same number of dollars but thanks to inflation that's a lot less buying power.

> Which is actually worse

why?

given "Airline tickets were more expensive"

I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off. Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight. (Ignoring things that changed in the rest of society: in 1978 all flights had smoking sections!)

I specifically mentioned the price as the one metric that has improved. And it's a pretty important metric! But not the only one.

You can still get service, comfort, and quality on modern airlines - you just have to pay the 2026 equivalent of a 1977 coach ticket. And I'll bet today's first class is better than yesteryear's coach.

> I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off.

Ok, but why do you care how many airlines exist? Competition?

Guess what? There was a larger number of airline CEOs, and... less competition! Airline profit margins were fat back in the day (isn't excessive "producer surplus" supposedly a sign of a non-competitive market?).

Not only did the government set the maximum and minimum price an airline could charge, but all routes had to be approved by the government. Airlines who served a particular route were even allowed to protest when another airline petitioned to offer service on that route, and "too many competitors" was considered a valid reason to deny an application.

The reason we have so many fewer airlines today is that some airlines outcompeted others after airlines were finally allowed to compete for customers. One of the things that nobody likes to talk about w.r.t. competition is "what happens to the competitor who got out-competed?"

The answer is: He exits the market (goes bankrupt or gets merged into another competitor). This happens one-by-one until the number of competitors has been reduced enough to achieve a stable market equilibrium. That equilibrium is achieved when the number of competitors is sufficiently small to give the remaining competitors "pricing power" to maintain reasonable profit margins (and thus not go bankrupt).

> Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight.

Right, when the government makes it illegal to compete on price, you have to compete on other things.

You can still get that old-school level of service and comfort today. It's called first class, and it's great!

They do all sorts of wonderful things, like offer a glass of bubbly before takeoff, halfway decent food, loads of legroom, wide seats for our fat American butts, a couple free checked bags, and flight attendants who act like they give a damn. Most of that wasn't included in a domestic economy ticket back in the old days.

The best part is that modern domestic first class still only costs about the same as an old-school economy ticket. But it turns out that what almost all customers really want is the cheapest ticket possible. Their revealed preference is that they prefer lower quality, no checked bag, and cheaper prices. Airlines who offered this option survived and those who didn't perished.

Economy Plus or whatever most carriers call it these days (aka domestic first class) is definitely not "first class" in any real comfort sense.

I road it once, and the only real difference is an included hard drink, getting off first (which doesn't matter if you have a checked bag), and more leg room before your knees hit the wall in front of you. Debatable about feet room though, since feet can't slide under the wall...

> Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them

Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?

Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?

What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.

Free markets compete, it's what they do.

It's like getting mad at your cat for killing a bird - it's just what cats do.

The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.

> The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.

Or, you know…accept that a cat is a cat, and stop trying to regulate scratching simply because you don’t like it.

(I get that you probably understand this, but the “regulation is the solution” is kind of a leap. People whining about market pricing have always struck me as just fundamentally misunderstanding what capitalism is.)

"The market" is not a thing. My point is that there are rational agents making decisions here, and it's not even some intractable situation where you have 1,000 players and someone will necessarily be a scumbag.

I literally have heard "if you hate it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me from doing it" from a techie, and man. No. You have agency. You own this. If you need a regulator to stop you, you're not a good person, sorry.

My point is that it's totally unclear to me that that's how this happened. There were at least a few airlines that did not say "we're gonna try the same", such as People Express Airlines and ValuJet, which explicitly tried to market themselves as fair, cheap, and transparently priced. Those airlines don't exist anymore. They went out of business, mostly because the other airlines used sophisticated pricing schemes to sabotage them. Maybe this was a failure of antitrust. It's certainly much more complicated than "all the airlines colluded together". Given the fact that the surviving airlines were never able to reach a particularly profitable "recoupment phase" of the predatory pricing process, it seems that this did not actually result in unfair prices on average (although business customers obviously get shafted every time).

> Maybe this was a failure of antitrust.

It's a failure of customer protections laws. The same service legally should cost each customer the same. Sophisticated pricing schemes should be just plainly illegal.

You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.

This reminds me that flat pricing is a relatively new invention

>> For most of human history, you had to haggle over prices before you could buy something. The Quakers were among the first people to commit to fixed prices — and they did it because it was good morals. Turned out, it was also good business. This is the strange story of the long journey of that little piece of paper.[0]

Seems maybe this is just getting back to haggling, except where the seller has an unfair advantage, and we are trying to eke back a somewhat fair playing field using AI.

It could end up that (maybe wishful thinking), if enough people do it, United Airlines banning AI booking agents may lose them enough business they will need to cut prices or invite in AI agents.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/28/589278258/plan...

So then, haggling should be illegal and banned or is this idea of "one price for everyone" only to be applied to airline tickets?

Negotiating a price is as old as humans. "That merchant over there is charging 10% less. Can you beat that?", "I want to buy 10 of these, can you give me a bulk discount?"

I have friends that haggle at local stores. One goes does the "Store X is cheaper thing". Another does "My parents live in Oregon where they're is no sales tax, can you lower your price to cover the difference? Otherwise I'll just have them bring it down from Oregon", etc....

How do you haggle with algorithm that is being fed on aggregated data of who you are, how much do you make and what you did yesterday?

It is nowhere close to example you gave.

Exactly. Haggling makes sense when the two parties hav similar levels of information and agency. For entirely one sided transactions where one party has all the power such arbitrage only benefits the powerful party and it is very reasonable for us to come together and decide to make that illegal.

That's not true.

There are many conditions under which price variation allows the seller to maximize the overall amount of services/products that it sells to the largest number of people, all of whom feel like they're getting a good deal.

Should a loaf of bread cost the same thing in Malaysia as it does in the US? No. And if you required it to be such, then people in Malaysia simply wouldn't have bread, and people in the US would likely have higher prices because cutting off less-wealthy markets would reduce the economies of scale that drive overall prices.

Of course you can!

I definitely have increased the price of consulting for "annoying" customers doing stuff I don't want to do. Many moons ago, I was doing some contract training for a small airline here in town. I liked teaching but I didn't really want to do the training they wanted me to do - it was a pain in the ass, it took a week, and didn't really pay enough to justify the opportunity cost.

So I kept raising my price, and eventually, they stopped asking me to do the training. It was great because I didn't have to do the thing I didn't want to do anymore, and I made more money. You are allowed to charge different people different amounts of money - some people are just a pain in the butt and charging more pays for the lack of sanity.

I agree with the principle but where I think price discrimination goes too far is, for example, Uber charging people more by age or statistically imputed income. Or PlayStation charging more for a game by the time of day.

Notice the difference. One is charging people more because they're actually costing you something by imposing an inconvenience, the other is charging people more because you've X-rayed their wallet and set the price to be the amount that cleans them out.

> Notice also the thing the customers should be doing in response to the second one: Sharing the prices they're shown for everything with the other customers so they can arbitrage by having the person offered the lowest price be the one to order it.

Ah, but this is worst in industries where resale is not possible. For example, flights, digital games, and rideshare. Of course one has the option to just not fly, buy games, or use Uber, but this limits a lot of convenience and function in a modern society. This is why I think targeted regulation is not such a bad thing - provided, as you explain, that the reason for the price discrimination is not because the customer actually costs the business more.

It's not practical to have customers coordinating purchases in that manner. What should happen is the customers report to a regulatory agency "this seller is engaging in illegal price discrimination" and that agency brings the hammer down.

But you don't have a way to figure out what your competitors are charging and have automated systems find the maximum you can extract without losing the customer

But that's just charging different amounts for different services. Not at all the same as the typical end user price discrimination which is all about charging whatever you can get away with with that particular cusomer.

Market segmentation is widely practiced.

My local grocery store has a senior discount on Tuesday mornings.

Many places have student discounts.

Some places offer a discount if you buy in bulk.

I used to be a book store club member, which would give me a discount on prices. A local history club has monthly public talks, with discounted prices for members. And of course most grocery stores have that sort of scheme.

My father worked for a company which offered family discounts to its employees.

You'll find little support for making all of those illegal.

Of course some of these schemes are illegal in some areas, such as a bar offering discounted drinks for women, but those fall under civil rights law, not customer protection.

The main difference between your examples and what prompted this discussion is transparency. The student/senior discounts aren't actively hidden from other customers.

And bulk discounts aren't market segmentation, but a way for the store to pass on reduced costs due to lower overheads to the customer. Again, they are also usually clearly disclosed because incentives are aligned.

I mentioned grocery store cards. I'm pretty sure you know that while they show club prices on the shelf, many actively hide additional discounts by offering personalized discounts, right?

I don't every remember seeing places which are transparent about the discounts they offer staff and family off staff. At the very least, I've never seen signs listing those discounts.

Okay, it's not market segmentation. My comment was in response to what scott79 wrote: 'You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy.'

That means that if I didn't list a bulk price and someone comes in and asks what the discount is for a bulk order, then, what, I need to refuse them?

Or can I can scribble the price on the tag right then, for the sale, and erase it immediately afterward?

I'm simply not able to figure out what the guidelines should be. I'm also not sure that "transparent" is that useful of a term, given how easy it is to put clauses in terms&services which people affirm without reading.

Or from HHGTTG: “But the plans were on display…” ... “It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

> You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.

It should be but unfortunately I don't think it is. The main reason store prices are the same for everyone is because it wasn't practical to individualize them without making it clear to purchasers that they are getting screwed. Still, store membership programs / value cards are one way this is being done in a limited way. And some stores are already switching to digital price labels which can be updated instantly so this is going to get a whole lot worse.

I agree in principle but airfare pricing must be more complicated and harder to get right than normal retail. Seems crtainly worth trying to get this right tho

> I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.

No, the thing they're doing is still awful.

The basic problem is that they do actually have competitors and are offering a product which is basically fungible, so their margins are inherently going to suck, even if they do every slimy thing, because then their competitors will just do the same thing and they're back to having thin margins only now they've made everything more deceptive/inconvenient/confusing.

The ideal thing in a market like that is to have an efficient way for customers to cut through the BS and find the best price for a ticket that isn't screwing them in covert ways, because then the deceptive tactics don't work, which takes away the incentive to do them. They'll still have thin margins, only with less deception.

But an individual airline can't unilaterally allow that if their competitors have a way to block it or they'd be at a competitive disadvantage, so they're going to try to stop that from happening. It's in no one's interest -- not even theirs -- to let them. They just need you to not let their competitors get away with it either.

Delta is one of the healthier companies with an operating margin of 9.4 percent (this year's September earnings)

What about over the last 10 years or so?

I can barely afford to live because I'm competing with others for the same scarce supply of houses. I will use AI to try to get me refunds, fuck the company.

“Good” schools are made up of their members. Good houses are largely a function of location, and community. Good groceries… I don’t know. Never knew this was an issue in the year 2026 outside of, like, North Korea.

But anyhow, you see the problem.

> Never knew this was an issue in the year 2026 outside of, like, North Korea.

Look up food deserts. I'm sure there are myriad issues you think exist only in North Korea.

Blue Apron, instacart, hello fresh, etc. The logistical options boggle the mind, as long as one has enough money.

Likely cheaper than owning a car in a food desert though.

If one had enough money they wouldn't be living in a food desert.

Food deserts are simply a consequence of grocery retailers avoiding locations that are unprofitable because of high shrinkage.

I honestly don’t see the point of this comment, it’s not even that coherent. Are you saying poor communities should just go conjure up some “location” benefits, or conjure up some money to get more nutritious food? Please expand.

> it’s not even that coherent.

They are saying the biggest problem with poor communities is the people living in them. That seems true statistically no? Or at least, there's more data that supports that than the idea that there's magic soil in the rich communities

Maybe if you took one step farther out, you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors. But go on, keep blaming all your problems on the individual poor people that obviously have something wrong with them.

> But go on, keep blaming all your problems on the individual poor people that obviously have something wrong with them.

Well, I didn't say I had any problems so I'm not sure what you're even referencing here. Weird strawman

> you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors.

Oh spare me. This is like reaching algebra and thinking you've reached the frontier of mathematics in 2026. As if nature vs nurture wasn't drilled into every prepubescent brain in even the worst school systems in the west.

This comment doesn't even make sense. Nobody is stopping you from pricing your services however you want

Humans need a minimum of about 1,200 calories a day. If a human prices their services too low, they won't be able to afford to eat and will die. If a human prices their services too high, they won't be able to afford to eat and will die.

You cannot price your services however you want.

I know you think you said something interesting, but you really didn't. You can absolutely price your services however you want, and if you die pricing your services too high or low, well that was a silly thing to want.

That has nothing to do with what we are talking about though, and was not the point in the first place.

You have my deepest sympathies, but to be clear, I would genuinely prefer to live in a world where airline pricing was more transparent and fair, I just can't attribute the fact that I don't live in that world to greed on the part of airlines

One of the most interesting things I recently discovered about airlines in the States is basically none of them make money selling airline tickets. It's break even at best. They are all credit card companies who happen to also fly people around.

European budget airliners make money with selling overpriced sandwiches and coffee. People want cheap so the profit has to come from somewhere.

Around break even is exactly where comoditized services should be.

> It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.

Or perhaps it’s simply not a functioning competitive market in the first place, for a variety of reasons including obvious ones like large barriers to entry.