It's not just about bargain basement product though. Supermarkets do offer premium products and prices more people can afford. Maybe not hand-reared meat, but better cuts of meat from e.g. Aberdeen Angus. The Bronze turkey we had for Christmas was dry hung, bought at Aldi (a German owned chain that operates here in the UK) at the price of a basic bird from a butcher.
My experience of supermarket premium products is that they are barely acceptable approximations of a quality version of the product.
Take cheese, for example - it's much easier to taste the difference with cheese. I've never had a UK supermarket Comte comparable to a Comte from a cheesemonger, no matter how premium it was advertised.
Or pastries. The only widely distributed supermarket in the UK with what I would consider edible pastries is Waitrose, and not all branches have a decent range. But bakeries in the UK have their own mass-market pathologies.
What really brought the insight home to me was my experience eating in Morocco. There, bread was baked by street vendors - it was always fresh and warm. You have to get lucky with timing to get the same experience in the UK, even if you go to bakeries. I realised we've lost certain qualities of life with our economic setup, and the more I found out about good food, the more I realised that supermarkets and commoditization had created a mechanism that forced me to work much harder to get good food.
Anyway, this isn't directly related to airline seats, but I do think the ratchet effect is real and it shows up in a lot of places.
> There, bread was baked by street vendors - it was always fresh and warm. You have to get lucky with timing to get the same experience in the UK, even if you go to bakeries.
Maybe that's just the UK? In Germany, many supermarket and discount store chains have recently been outfitting their stores with bakery stations, where you have a somewhat decent chance of actually getting warm rolls.
Also, I've had a pretty good experience with premium products in German supermarkets. I only rarely buy from a premium store (sometimes for cheese, almost never for meat), but when I do, their performance is pretty comparable to supermarket premium lines.
Yeah, that sounds like just the Anglosphere. I've been to Montreal and lived in Israel, and in both those places you darn well get fresh bread and pastries in either the supermarket or bakery shop of your choosing.
Mind, I was fortunate enough to live in the best baking city in Israel (something like 53 bakeries in a city of 300000 people, plus supermarkets and open street markets), but still.
