Like everywhere else, Spain is a place where virgin olive oil is more expensive than the defiled version.
If you live there (or if the research was done there), there would be no point buying oil in the supermarket and you always have the best oil on tap for next to nothing. Hence everyone there uses it for everything.
I had a friend from Canada who returned Home a while ago and he went to the supermarket to buy oil to put on his salad. He saw the price of EVOO and came back with a bottle of sunflower oil, scoffing about the "scam" of EVOO. A couple of weeks later he told me "well, it's really better though isn't it?" and he started buying EVOO after that. I don't know what changed his mind.
Anyway I get it that EVOO sounds like a class marker and I've no doubt it is, in some parts of the world. Another poster was talking about virtue signalling. But in the neck of the woods I'm from (the Mediterranean) it's just not considered posh, or hip, to buy good olive oil, nor do you ever hear anyone bragging about it. It's just how people eat, and they prefer the best quality stuff than the lower quality stuff. Of course, the low quality stuff also sells just because some people can't afford the good quality stuff, and I guess there's also people who are not used to it, even if they're born in one of the places that are famous for it.
There's just a completely different mentality about EVOO (and some other foodstuffs: bread, wine, cheese maybe) in some parts of the Old World. It's about culture and (gulp) identity rather than fashion and those preferences will not change when EVOO (etc) goes out of fashion.
