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Comment by snakeyjake | Hacker News Reader

If the article was wrong, those reviews wouldn't even exist because people would never assume that the HOODOOVOODOO-brand product that's 1/4th the price of something that's not named by a passphrase generator is any good due to a basic understanding of how the world works.

And Darn Tough would have a monopoly on socks.

People only care about cost. The #1 irrefutable indicator of this is airline ticket prices: if Airline A charges $117 for a ticket and Airline B charges $110 but will also kick you in the nuts and nickel-and-dime you for everything to the point that it actually costs more in the end than Airline A...

...people will choose Airline B every time.

The vast majority of people will search for a flight, sort by price, and buy the cheapest ticket no matter what.

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Start an airline that offers $1 cheaper tickets but they kick you in the groin, you’ll make bank.

Start an airline that offers $1 cheaper tickets but they crash once a month, you’ll go out of business before you can say “but FAA regulations make that impossible anyway.”

People care deeply about airline quality on the axis of how good they are at keeping you alive. They don’t care so much about amenities. That’s not “don’t care about quality,” that’s “don’t care about a specific notion of quality that you believe everyone should care about.”

The fact that people choose the cheapest of something does not mean they don't care about quality. It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much.

To prove this, imagine if airline A & B had similar very cheap prices (and the attendant poor service that comes with it), but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.

>It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much.

That, what you just wrote, your own words, not my, but your, assertion, literally and explicitly means that people don't care about quality.

>but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.

This is demonstrably false and every airline that has tried has either failed or been subsidized by their national government. (Signed, a former Continental Airlines devotee.)

Plenty of people will never, ever, fly RyanAir. And plenty of people choose an airline based on the airline's loyalty rewards program which gives them a higher-quality product (earlier boarding, more leg room, easier changes to flights). It's quite routine among people who travel a lot.

If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them.

Yes, airplane travellers are incredibly price conscious--that's the nature of a near-commodity market. But nearly every single flight has a significant fraction of travelers who have paid more for a higher-quality product.

>If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them.

I consider 95% of all people in a population to be the "close enough please shut the fuck up about it and be reasonable for once in your god damned life" threshold where "everybody" becomes an acceptable descriptor.

What percentage of people will ever, in their entire lives, fly first class?

Are we pretending their sentence ends at the word first-class then, so it's as if you're countering their argument when you actually aren't?

https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/airlines-increasing-p... Key number "53 premium seats per flight"

https://i0.wp.com/crankyflier.com/wp-content/uploads/image-8...

So if A & B are have the same (low) price, and B is higher quality, you would still choose A?

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