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Life is full of games. The competiveness that is bred into humans to survive, thrive, and compete is expressed in modern society as social and financial pressures to do one thing over another, a person's response to those pressures. Much of the time, the rules are different than you think they are, and so it's hard to know how to spend your time and money.
One game that's often mis-understood is the role of media. For instance, television producers (or magazine publishers, or newspaper editors, or whatever) aren't in the business that many people think they are. Publishers/producers are in the business of selling an audience to their advertisers. The advertisers are their customers. We, as subscribers, get the priviledge of paying money to be part of the pool of the audience. The tradeoff is that we may get articles that have information that is of interest. Whether to buy a magazine is the question of is the value of the content worth putting yourself in their advertising pool.
And the games change. The game of airline travel used to be that travel agents could get you things that was available nowhere else. The ubiquity internet travel sites and information sources (who are providing an audience for their advertisers too) have made travel agents less relevant.
And nowadays you can check into your flight, print boarding passes, and get seats assigned on-line 24 hours in advance of your flight. This is a hook to get consumers a service that makes their lives more convenient. I've only done that once, for a Delta flight I was on a few weeks ago. I got on the morning of the flight, and got to choose seats (sort of, most of them were reserved).
I'm flying United tomorrow morning, and I just checked in and printed my boarding passes. However, United has put an interesting twist on that process. During the check-in process, United offers to let you pay them money to buy a ticket with more leg room. I declined that, and continued with the check-in process. Then I went to select my seats, and I discovered that the coveted exit row seats have been X-ed off. I can't sit in them with my class of ticket. Apparently, the procedure (at least at United) has been altered in favor of the airline. You can pay for the priviledge of an exit row seat...or you can sit in a regular seat with the rest of the schmoes. It's still worth it (in my opinion) to check in early, but the possibility of picking an exit row seat has been taken away. We live in a society of games. If you don't know who the sucker is in the deal, it's you.
This has been a public service message from www.craigsteffen.net.