In the Ideal/Just World I’d like this to be true, but I’m not sure whether it actually plays out that way as reliably as I’d like. Right now theaters seem to be in an equilibrium where most of them do the same bad practices, making it hard to actually shop around.
(Meanwhile, I notice for myself that the biggest factor in which theater I go to is simply how close it is to my house, and what time it’s playing the movie I want to see)
I think a similar thing is at play with airlines – sure, there’s all kinds of ways I’d like the experience to be better, but it seems like most people basically just want cheap flights, and apart from egregious deceptive practices (where there’s so many add-ons you’re forced to buy that you learn to distrust the listed price completely), basically just going for cheap listed price seems to matter most.
An important bit with the Amazon article I linked is that most people don’t know how to value their time, so trying to solve the problem in a way that properly values people time does not naively pay off.
At least some of the time companies seem to succeed by consistently delivering great products that respect me as a person, but it’s far from obvious this is the dominating strategy even over the long term.
In the Ideal/Just World I’d like this to be true, but I’m not sure whether it actually plays out that way as reliably as I’d like. Right now theaters seem to be in an equilibrium where most of them do the same bad practices, making it hard to actually shop around.
(Meanwhile, I notice for myself that the biggest factor in which theater I go to is simply how close it is to my house, and what time it’s playing the movie I want to see)
I think a similar thing is at play with airlines – sure, there’s all kinds of ways I’d like the experience to be better, but it seems like most people basically just want cheap flights, and apart from egregious deceptive practices (where there’s so many add-ons you’re forced to buy that you learn to distrust the listed price completely), basically just going for cheap listed price seems to matter most.
An important bit with the Amazon article I linked is that most people don’t know how to value their time, so trying to solve the problem in a way that properly values people time does not naively pay off.
At least some of the time companies seem to succeed by consistently delivering great products that respect me as a person, but it’s far from obvious this is the dominating strategy even over the long term.