That's a very interesting phenomenon with the butchers (and about 1/5th of the American retail economy in my experience), but it's not what's happening in airline services.

Airlines have jacked up the prices of comfortable berths people can sleep in on long haul journeys to almost 10x the price of shrinking torture chairs that most of us buy. For a long while business class and coach drew apart in price even as business got more luxurious with flat beds and fancy wines while coach seats in Boeing's newest, most advanced 787 jets are the narrowest trans-oceanic seats ever sold and Spirit/Frontier domestic seats don't even recline anymore.

But that difference was driven by corporate executive passengers whose employers were paying the 10x prices and getting tax breaks for doing so. Corporate sales is complicated and charging more can actually sell more units so the airlines carefully eliminated mid-priced options to force businesses to pay far more for the very profitable business class seats than their marginal cost.

And economic rationality has reasserted itself. Premium economy seating is now common on airlines outside the USA without such easily gamed large corporations to scam. The premium economy is similar in quality to old-fashioned business class seating at prices that middle class leisure travellers can afford. Mostly you can't buy it from the USA without paying a steep premium, but anyone flying to the USA from abroad has been able to for about a decade. Carriers refused to sell it at the same prices in the USA because running the game on corporate purchasing departments is so lucrative. For example, JAL and Cathay Pacific round trip fares between the Far East and USA in premium economy have been about $500-1000 more originating in the USA than in their home countries.

But Delta and American are now outfitting planes with premium economy because it's the most profitable use of space for carriers that have it and supporting the corporate business class sales inflation scam can't hold it back anymore. American is flying the new class on planes already. Even CX and JL prices are starting to rationalize.

So the key variable in airline discomfort has been American corporate purchasing culture irrationality and not the natural division of markets into tiers. Corporate purchasing irrationality and cartel pricing to exploit it are also the drivers of advance-purchase fares, last-minute price gouging, saturday night stay requirements, steep premiums for one-way fares, and lots of other paradoxical and nasty pricing strategies.