This is such a pervasive argument also used to justify a lot of bad stuff in tech ("if we don't do it, our competitors will" / "if you don't like it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me").

This is a small world. The US has something like ten major airlines. Eight if you don't count subsidiaries. Someone at the first one made a decision to embrace an exploitative pricing model. And then, someone at the second airline looked at this and thought to themselves, "you know, we're not gonna organize a PR campaign to stigmatize it, we're gonna try the same".

I can barely afford to live because I'm competing with others for the same scarce supply of houses, good schools, and groceries.

Where is the sympathy for me? Why do only large corporations get to use the "competition" excuse?

> It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.

Or perhaps it’s simply not a functioning competitive market in the first place, for a variety of reasons including obvious ones like large barriers to entry.

One of the most interesting things I recently discovered about airlines in the States is basically none of them make money selling airline tickets. It's break even at best. They are all credit card companies who happen to also fly people around.

Delta is one of the healthier companies with an operating margin of 9.4 percent (this year's September earnings)