Low-cost carriers have very different businesses too focused on lowering costs. The "low-cost" in the name refers to the carrier's costs, not the customers. They typically have all-economy planes and use a single aircraft model (e.g. easyJet exclusively flies the Airbus A320 family), which dramatically lowers crew and maintenance costs. They also offer little flexibility, have no interline agreements, and have no additional services (meals, etc.).
Yeah; low cost carriers are like IKEA or Walmart or (old) Amazon strategically, they deliver a known quantity at a competitive price and shave their margin out of the cost side rather than growing it on the revenue side. But they are also often low-cost for the customers, particularly the more notorious examples (e.g. Ryanair). Companies whose profitability comes from penny-pinching usually fit best with customers who are themselves penny-pinching.
(Oddly, it occurs to me that European companies do a really good job of settling in the niche of "penny-pinching to the point of being kind of terrible, but such an amazing bargain you can't complain"--IKEA, Ryanair, Aldi, Lidl. Walmart felt bad about being terrible and tried to get a little nicer to compete with Target; Amazon felt bad about being cheap and terrible and decided to chase a membership model and set up a cloud computing business on the side. Maybe it's because America has a deep inborn cultural fiction of not having social classes and companies feel embarrassed about obviously not catering to the quintessential middle class American family?)
