Same thing with the airline industry. People often say they'd pay more for extra few inches of leg room, but when they shop online, it's the cheapest price that wins.
Flyers routinely pay more for direct flights. International travelers often pay much more to avoid transiting unpleasant countries like the USA with its awful security procedures. Lots of people want to pay more for more width and recline in seats on long haul flights; no US carrier offers those but W class on foreign carriers is often their most profitable space.
But few want to pay more for leg room. It's just not much of a benefit compared to the five things I mentioned (and several others like comfortable lounges at hubs -- but not apparently decent food). The airlines want to sell leg room because it's very easy to adjust.
Basically, the problem seems to be that the USA does not have "sterile transit"; if your plane stops there in the way to somewhere else, you have to disembark and go through customs, and you need an expensive visa.
It's not the money but the abuse they can dish out at you. Even if you get a visa (which is a pain in the neck and a total time sink on it's own), customs can just tell you "You know what? Go f yourself." After you've landed...
Try pricing tickets regularly between Latin America and Asia. My peer groups buys a lot of such tickets and the AeroMexico tickets that fly with a change of planes in MEX and go on to PVG and NRT with no USA transfer cost about US$500 more than tickets that change planes in LAX, SFO, DFW, and SEA. YVR is usually priced in between but sometimes Air Canada has deals.
There are no other flights directly between Asia and Latin America (unless you count the EK GRU-DXB flight), though NH may be flying to MEX soon.
Flying in the US is a consistently miserable experience. Airports which are too small for the number of flights they handle - leading to cascading gate changes and flight delays, slow & interrogative customs which you must go through even if you're getting a connecting flight straight out of the US, obvious complaints about the TSA and airlines who all (apart from Southwest in my experience) really just have no interest in making flying a pleasant or comfortable time for you.
On my most recent trip to the US I selected cities that I could get between via train to avoid the entire mess apart from arrival into the US (and made an effort to depart out of Canada).
Part of the reason that people go for the cheapest price is that all of the other variables in flight aren't really verifiable.
Among a wide variety of industries, a large portion of revenues come from "upsales", pushing some impulse buys extra like insurance. Which is to say that the impulse buy extras are shitty ripoffs and consumers over time have grown to expect promises to be worthless and to only pay for things they can clearly verify.
And that relates to selling cellphone with longer battery life - all the companies make unrealistic claims, how could someone feel safe giving up something that can see (like a feature or a smaller size) for something they can't see?
Discoverability of things like leg room is also practically zero when booking. Even if it was easier to see it, there are usually very few options anyways and they often differ hugely on other criteria like number of stops, departure time and price. I might be happy to pay fifty fiat extra for a free inch more leg room even more on a longer flight. Am I willing to have an extra stop for that out get out of bed at 4am instead of 6am or leave awkwardly in the middle of the day to arrive in the evening my vacation spot and effectively lose half a day at my vacation spot? No
I think the airline market hardly ever offers real choices and many things that look like choices end up actually being the same flight sold by different carriers from the same alliance. Alliances are a huge pet peeve of mine anyways. There are certain (US based) airlines I strongly dislike and would like to avoid. However, it's almost impossible. Even if I book another carrier the flight often times end up being operated by them again. Sometimes it gets changed after I book. This is a dysfunctional market. I want Delta and United out of business and I've had the same from others. Yet we are all stuck flying them because we can't avoid it.
Want +3in legroom? For each flight, go to a flight forum and punch in the route to figure out what plane they're flying. Google the airline and that plane to figure out how much legroom is available.
Give up and just fly jetblue and/or southwest, and if they don't go, decline to travel.
You have to select the airline and buy the ticket before you get that map, don't you? By then it's too late. I'm talking about the initial search process, where you decide which flight you're going to take. The only data present are the price, arrival & departure times, and the airline name.
I try to avoid emergency exit seats because they take away the storage space underneath the seat in the front. I'd rather have provisions, laptop, pen, book(s), tissues etc. available without fetching them from overhead storage, and sacrifice the extra leg space.
Speak for yourself... I almost always try to get a first class seat, unfortunately when I travel by plane, it's usually on short notice, and I'm generally stuck with whatever is available... worst yet is when the seat you select when buying your ticket isn't the one you're assigned when you checkin. First class is usually 3x the price, and yet I always look... as a fairly tall fat guy, comfort is something that I probably value more than someone who weighs in under 180# at 5'9 though.
Most consider flying first class a luxury reserved for the wealthy or those who don't fly very often. The majority of flyers could never consider a first class ticket a responsible purchase.
Usually because it's ridiculously expensive. Would I pay 20-50% more for a first class seat? Probably. Would I spend 2-3x more? No. I'm still going to be miserable, the flight is still going to take just as long, and once it's over I'll be out all that extra money.
Those who fly a lot may get frequent upgrades through an airline's loyalty program. Some programs will upgrade you automatically if there are any seats available.
Last long distance flight I did we took economy premium, considering the amount of luggage we had, it was actually cheaper, and the leg room was very reasonable.
But few want to pay more for leg room. It's just not much of a benefit compared to the five things I mentioned (and several others like comfortable lounges at hubs -- but not apparently decent food). The airlines want to sell leg room because it's very easy to adjust.