Calculated misery’ is the theory that commercial airlines make their customer experience so awful that people will spend money on services that used to be free in order to avoid the inconvenience.
Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor, first coined the phrase in 2014 in a piece for the New Yorker where he described a joint effort by the airline industry to maximize profits by making baseline products low quality then offering upgrades for purchase.
‘In order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery,”‘ said Wu.