Air travel was already annoying as hell. But it’s gotten progressively worse in recent years, what with the consolidation of airlines and elimination of duplicate routes. Everything has been about squeezing out excess supply to put a floor under prices. And then there’s the parsing up of all the different levels of service, of boarding, of perquisites and privileges that used to be bog-standard. United’s “Basic Economy” is the latest – the baseline is now no early check-in, no seat assignment, and no use of the overhead bins. Literally everything that was free fifteen years ago is now an extra charge: checked bag, overhead bin, in-flight snack, even knowing what seat you might be in.
It doesn’t have to be like this, and it wouldn’t be if there was a lick of competition. But it’s the age-old story: few enough players in a market with a high barrier to entry, and they’ll divide and conquer rather than compete. It’s why your only broadband choices are either your cable company or your phone company, assuming your phone company hasn’t decided it’s not worth the effort to compete. And it’s why one of the unsung heroics of the Obama-era FCC was their refusal to allow AT&T to purchase T-Mobile in 2011. Without that, there’s no Un-Carrier, there’s no push back toward “unlimited” data, and there’s probably not much in the way of MNVO options, since most of the BYOD prepaid SIM-sellers seem to be backboned on T-Mob. And with only one GSM-based carrier and only two 850Mhz options per market (plus Sprint’s bad bet on WiMax), you’re back to an effective duopoly.
I don’t know if the free market naturally trends toward monopoly, but too much of our modern life is dependent on things where there are inherent limits – spectrum, airline gates, or just the ability to dig up the street – and yet, we allow the fact of two options to let us say “competition!” (Or worse, decide that your cellphone is competition for your home broadband. I’m surprised these airline mergers didn’t raise the danger of Amtrak competition.) The funny thing is, this isn’t as much of a problem elsewhere; Ireland (the size of Alabama) has three cellular carriers and rates half what gets charged in the US. This is all down to a government dictate that GSM would be the standard; by letting the US divide between TDMA and CDMA and GSM, we were condemned to incompatible standards and an inability to move between carriers that has propped up prices and limited real competition to this day. Little bit of regulation – explosion of competition.
But we’ve had forty years of acting as if the corporation is to be run for the benefit of the stock traders, not the shareholders or the employees or the customers. It’s how we got bloated CEO compensation and three-month profit goosing by layoff and the general casino atmosphere of business. And our business has evolved to match, in case you hadn’t noticed the spray-money-throw-a-dart approach to Silly Con Valley. Seriously, the very “gas delivery” service that was a punchline on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia in 2008 got $3 million in funding in 2015. Just to service Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Redwood City, of all places.
Of which.