Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
Suppose the middle seat isn't blocked and someone has a lap chid. With high probability the parent will put the kid in the empty middle seat, right next to the customer with the misfortune to be assigned to sit on the other side of the blocked seat. Alternatively, if a family can't get seats together, they'll move into the middle seat that's supposed to be empty.
Agree this would be an issue if it was only middle seats open, however at this point flights are averaging about a dozen people, maybe two dozen if it's extremely busy.
Now, if traffic picks up again then I could see the need to properly block the middles. A simple fix would be installing a little permanent table like AA used to do in rows 16 and 17 on their 738s back when they were staffed with only 3 FAs to keep the seats at 150.