There is demand for first class seating from nearly 100% of fliers. They're just not willing to pay what AA is charging. This isn't a supply and demand decision. Econ 101 says that means AA should reduce the price, but capitalism in practice says the constant desire for more profit and the monopoly that most industries have been allowed to grow and maintain means never lower the price and find a new way to fuck the plebs who don't even own a single yacht.

It's less that there's not a demand so much as supply and demand work together. Not appart. When it comes to accounting, there are different ways to look at different things. The main one is financial accounting. Another one is taxes.

In the case of this: managerial accounting. Something that a lot of corporations seem to be failing at lately. Managerial accounting is basically finding information to report to the managers. For instance, breaking down the cost of an item to see how much it costs to produce, comparing it to how much it makes, etc.

One thing they do is figuring out how much to raise the cost of a good/service. It's a slight gamble in that you can never be 100% sure, but they try to find that sweet spot where they can raise it without scaring away too many people and eventually losing money. In this case, they charge too much. The cost of flying, like everything else, has gone up. And we get worse service while there. So if you're raising the cost of the different services, and you find that people are now only going with the cheaper option, you have likely started over charging. You need to drop the price of both services.

For instance, I might be willing to spend an extra $50 for an upgrade. But if you raise the price of the cheap service by $100, now I don't have the money. Make the gap between the two $100, and now I really don't have enough.

Of course, when every company made it a race to riase proces as much as possible, at this point I don't think many companies have much of a choice. They all kind of fucked everything all at once, including themselves. But they made a profit in the short term, so there's that.