There's a pattern in most sectors where one party performs an optimization to reduce cost. Their margins are great until everyone else catches up. At that point

There's a pattern in most sectors where one party performs an optimization to reduce cost. Their margins are great until everyone else catches up. At that point, margins are back to razpr thin except you now bear the downsides of the optimization. You cannot regress because the market won't allow it. So you are now stuck, looking for another big move to get ahead. In a lot of ways, I feel the emergence of dual income households has done that. It might have been economically advantageous at one point, but now (at least in HCOL areas) it's almost a requirement to just get by. I heard someone say that while wages haven't really kept up with inflation, but household income has. I would love to see a source for that, but it would make sense to me.