The tierfication of everything

How the K-shaped economy shows up in your grocery store, your airline seat, and your sense of self

I was on a Norse Airways flight last year when the flight attendant asked if I wanted water. I said yes. She said that would be four euros.

Four euros. For water. On a plane. In the sky. Where I could not leave. Where I had no choice.

I remember thinking: This is it. This is the logical endpoint of consumer capitalism. But, of course, it was not.

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If you’ve flown recently, you know the deal. There’s the security sorting (in New York there are often four lines — the regular security lines, one for TSA Precheck, one for Clear, and one for people who have both TSA Precheck and Clear).

Then, once you’re through, there’s the lounge question. Do you have access? Do you have the right credit card? And even if you do have access — is the lounge so overcrowded that you’re waiting in line to get into a room designed to help you skip the line?

Then boarding — and god, the boarding. Tell me why we need nine boarding groups, plus a preboarding phase. Main Cabin Extra, Comfort Plus, Premium Economy, Business, First, “Polaris,” “Mint,” whatever branded name justifies another tier. You shuffle past first class with your regulation-sized carry-on, trying not to make eye contact with the people already settled in with their pre-departure champagne.

Airlines didn’t invent consumer hierarchy. But they’ve perfected the visible sorting of it, the way every single interaction becomes a referendum on your status, your willingness to pay, your place in the economic order.

This sorting is everywhere now. There’s the obvious tiered pricing — streaming services, cloud storage, software, gym memberships, shipping. But there’s also concert tickets. Sports games. Disney World. Rideshares. Hotel stays. Cruises. Coffee shops. Restaurant reservations. Even Costco (which already requires a membership to enter) has added exclusive early shopping hours for Executive members only.

Yes, luxury options have always existed. It’s just how ubiquitous this pricing model has become. It’s made the sorting much more visible. We’re meant to see where we fall, and we’re meant to see where others fall, too.

As one travel expert put it: “Getting on the plane before someone else is somewhat of a status symbol here. The tiered nature of the different boarding groups is meant to give order to the chaos, but it’s also a way for the airline to offer their VIP clients the added benefit of boarding before us plebs.”

So why do companies do this?

Money, obviously.

You can make more money per customer (sometimes, up to 98% more) by using tiered pricing over single-price models. So companies are essentially increasing customer stratification to a) boost revenues and b) identify exactly how much they can get out of each consumer.

The mechanism has a name in economics: perfect price discrimination. It’s the holy grail for companies: Charging each customer the absolute maximum they’re personally willing to pay.

For decades, this was mostly theoretical. To actually do it, you’d need to know everything about your customers: their income, their urgency, their alternatives, their psychological breaking points, etc. Now they do.

Between your browsing history, purchase patterns, location data, app usage, and social media behavior, companies have assembled remarkably detailed profiles of who you are and what you’ll tolerate. And AI is turning that mountain of data into real-time pricing decisions.

That’s why you and your friend can see different prices for the same flight, searched at the same time, on different devices.

@haseeblegal#law #surveillancepricing #consumer #uber

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Because tierification is so lucrative, companies have no incentive to stop doing it. And the economy is creating the environment for it to only get worse.

The K-shaped engine

Economists call it the “K-shaped economy” — the divergence where high earners recovered quickly after the pandemic while everyone else struggled. I’ve written about this extensively, but the short version: the two arms of the K have kept diverging.

Companies, being companies, follow the money. And the money is at the extremes.

“That middle ground no longer really exists,” retail consultant Doug Stephens told Marketplace. “And if it does, it’s tenuous or unremarkable. Why bother?”

So products bifurcate. Premium tiers multiply at the top, where margins are fat and customers are flush. Basic tiers get stripped to the bone at the bottom, where volume is the only play. The middle — the reliable, decent, just-fine option — goes away.

What’s left is a constant sorting mechanism. Every purchase, every interaction, every experience becomes a visible marker of which arm of the K you’re on.

The enshittification connection

If tierfication sounds related to “enshittification“ — the term writer Cory Doctorow coined for how platforms decay — that’s because they’re twins.

Enshittification describes a lifecycle: Platforms start out good for users to attract them, then gradually degrade the experience to extract more value — first for business customers, then for shareholders. By the end, everyone’s getting squeezed.

Tierification is its consumer-facing sibling. But the base tier doesn’t just stay the same while the premium tier improves. It actively gets worse to make the upgrade feel more necessary.

The free streaming tier adds more ads, longer ads, unskippable ads. The basic airline seat loses another inch of legroom. Standard shipping takes a day longer. The regular checkout line gets one fewer cashier while “priority” members breeze through.

This is by design. Make the bottom tier uncomfortable enough and people will pay to escape it.

The access economy and psychology of “special”

People like to feel special.

Earning status gives you a goal to chase. Paying for status lets you feel above the crowd. The whole system is designed to manufacture that feeling — and then monetize it.

This is why we’re seeing an explosion of what might be called the access economy: Not just selling products, but selling access to experiences, to spaces, to moments that other people can’t have. Half the value is the experience itself. The other half is being able to post about it.

But when too many people gain access to something exclusive, the exclusivity itself loses value. So companies just create another tier on top.

This is literally happening with airport lounges right now. Delta Sky Clubs got so overcrowded that the company had to cap visits for AmEx cardholders and create entirely new “Delta One Lounges” — a tier above the Sky Club — for the truly elite. Eventually, those will get crowded, too.

It’s an endless ladder where the top rung keeps moving.

A confession

A few years ago, I spent an embarrassing amount of time and money chasing United status. I flew out of Newark, which is extremely not convenient for me, because it was a United hub. I tracked my qualifying miles. I paid more for specific flights just to get the extra miles.

And then I got Silver status. And I thought: What was the point of that?

Having Silver status gets you a free checked bag (I almost never check bags). It gets you the potential of upgrades (which you never actually get because you lose out to Golds and Platinums). It gets you Group 2 boarding, which — why do I want to get on the plane faster? To sit in the cramped seat longer?

Today, I refuse to pay for most flight upgrades. Business and first have gotten so absurdly expensive that the math never works (in my opinion). Even premium economy feels pointless to me — I’m short, so an extra six inches of legroom doesn’t change my life. In other words, I’ve opted out of that particular tier game.

But I haven’t opted out of all of them.

I have a tendency to pay more for anything that will save my time. For example, I pay for ad-free streaming on basically everything. I cannot handle ads. I get irrationally angry when a 90-second unskippable commercial interrupts whatever I’m watching. I know this is exactly what the streaming companies want. I pay anyway.

I also have Clear and TSA PreCheck (I take about 30-40 flights per year, so it feels justifiable). I have Spotify premium (the idea of someone listening to ads in the middle of a playlist is beyond my realm of comprehension).

This is how tierfication works on our brains. It’s not really about the upgrade itself, it’s about avoiding the downgrade. Behavioral economists call this loss aversion: we’re not gaining premium, we’re escaping degraded basic. The pain of being sorted into the lower tier outweighs the pleasure of the upgrade.

The psychological cost to tiering

There’s also a psychological cost to being constantly, visibly sorted into groups all the time. We’re all pretty aware of the wealth inequality in America, but what happens when that stratification becomes even more visible?

In a way, we’re being publicly categorized, repeatedly, throughout your day. Which, I would argue, can be sort of dehumanizing. Unlike older forms of class signaling (which were often about what you chose to display), tiered pricing systems assign your status to you and announce it. You don’t get to opt out of being sorted.

Even if you’re comfortable with your tier, so to speak, you’re constantly being reminded that higher tiers exist, that others are getting something better, that you could be doing better. It can keep us in a place of dissatisfaction.

It also generally erodes the idea of shared public experiences and products. As I wrote about in my essay about status symbols in 2026, a lot of our current infrastructure is becoming increasingly tiered and fragmented, and the real status now is being able to opt out of the sorting altogether.

Can you actually opt out?

So what do you do with this? I wish I had a clean answer. But the honest thing to say is that opting out of tierfication is genuinely hard, and in many cases, impossible.

You can refuse to chase status. I did that, eventually, with airlines. You can decide certain upgrades aren’t worth it and tolerate the degraded base tier. You can be intentional about where you spend the extra money and where you don’t.

But, throughout your daily life, you will continue to be sorted, whether you consciously realize it or not. We used to think of class as something you signaled through choices — the car you drove, the neighborhood you lived in, the watch you wore. Now it’s something that gets announced to you, repeatedly, throughout your day. You’re in Group 9. You’re on the ad-supported tier. You’re not an Executive member.

I do try to bring more awareness into my daily actions around this, asking myself things like: Am I paying for something I actually want? That’s often at the heart of avoiding the tantalizing forces around us, pushing us to spend and consume.

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That’s all for this week. I’d love to hear which tiers you’ve bought into, and which ones you’ve opted out of. Hit reply and tell me.