Generally, people have a heuristic of “if this is straightforwardly and immediately harmful, I’m going to be very skeptical about claims that contradict that. And this is not just because they’re stubbornly being irrational—it’s because it’s a lot easier to make a mistake or be convinced by sophistry when looking at long indirect chains of causation than direct ones.
The straightforward and immediate effect of not trying to sell a seat is that you lose money because you forego the possible income from selling that seat. It is possible that ripping out those seats has secondary effects that cumulatively result in you making more money anyway. But actually doing that calculation is hard (and your original post did not do the calculation—it speculated instead), and you are limited in how well you can assess the correctness of such a calculation. It ends up becoming a form of epistemic learned helplessness where the correct thing to do is to massively discount arguments for doing things that straightforwardly harm you.
Generally, people have a heuristic of “if this is straightforwardly and immediately harmful, I’m going to be very skeptical about claims that contradict that. And this is not just because they’re stubbornly being irrational—it’s because it’s a lot easier to make a mistake or be convinced by sophistry when looking at long indirect chains of causation than direct ones.
The straightforward and immediate effect of not trying to sell a seat is that you lose money because you forego the possible income from selling that seat. It is possible that ripping out those seats has secondary effects that cumulatively result in you making more money anyway. But actually doing that calculation is hard (and your original post did not do the calculation—it speculated instead), and you are limited in how well you can assess the correctness of such a calculation. It ends up becoming a form of epistemic learned helplessness where the correct thing to do is to massively discount arguments for doing things that straightforwardly harm you.