[Buzzfeed] If you've ever wondered why airlines in the US seem so terrible, from the cramped seats to the constant delays and the inexplicably bad responses to their customers being roughed up by goons, this graphic might help you understand the situation a little better.Over the last decade or so, 11 big US domestic airlines have shrunk down to five extremely big ones, in a frenzy of takeovers and mergers. With less competition to worry about, airlines are now doing exactly what you'd expect them to do: spend less time worrying about how to keep their customers happy, and more time working out how to make more money.
It's not rocket science, and it's the same reason your cable company's customer service sucks so much. What are you going to to about it?
(It's also the same reason why restaurants tend to treat you pretty well.)
A few years back, inspectors at the Department of Transportation tried to figure out exactly how connected competition is to good airline service. They studied the delayed flights over a seven-year period beginning in 2005, and checked to see if delays increased as competition between airlines decreased.
The results look pretty much exactly like you expect they would. Here's a graph of the average delay time across all flights, and how it changes as competition goes from intense, on the left, to nonexistent, on the right -- things get rapidly worse as competition thins away, and then remain at a baseline level of terrible as the market moves toward a monopoly.