The pain of paying , have you ever paid for something that was painful? The original meaning of the pain of paying is using cash. When we as human beings use a plastic card or a phone app to pay for something it doesn't feel painful, On the contrary it feels quite good sometimes and can even FEEL FREE! which encourages us and motivates us to spend more.
However eventually the bill comes due and if you use American Express and that bill is due at the end of the month to be paid in full you feel the pain once, only when paying THAT BILL. But if we pay for everything in cash we will continuously feel the pain every time something needs to be paid. This is the original ideology of the term pain for paying. However I think that term has evolved. Today we have the experience of paying for something that we really want and feeling inadequate once we actually get it, even if it's exactly what we want. I'm sure you've heard women regularly complain that their hairdresser was three hours late for their appointment. They are furious that they had to spend 5 hours at the salon for something that only took two hours to do.
Did they love the service?, absolutely!. Was it worth the money?, absolutely!
However they somehow feel cheated and feel as if they overpaid with their time being wasted. I think this is a new age example of the pain of paying.
I have this experience rather regularly to be honest but more recently I had this experience twice back-to-back which I imagine encouraged me to write this article explaining it and describing it to others.
My first incident was a trip my wife and I planned leaving from Turkey and arriving in Montenegro. To put it simply the flights where 300 bucks each, my wife mentioned that on the website Turkish Airlines gave limited baggage however they offered more baggage if you purchased an additional ticket. After doing the numbers my wife could clearly see that to pay for extra baggage would cost 400 extra dollars versus just paying for an extra ticket which would cost 300 extra dollars. I said go for it. She even called Turkish Airlines 3 different times to speak with three different individuals to verify that the extra ticket would be allowed to receive extra luggage.
She did the most she possibly could, however after arriving to the airline desk at the airport they refused to take our extra luggage for the extra ticket, they refused to allow us to bring extra luggage on the plane to take up the space of the seat that we paid for, and they insisted that we pay for extra luggage since our luggage was overweight. This situation hurt like hell because not only did we pay for a ticket that we did not need we also had to pay for the extra luggage. I was left with the pain and there's still a little bit there to this day.
The bait and switch and switch again
My second experience was the renting of a beautiful apartment in Montenegro. The apartment was two years old and had every feature and amenity you could think of. We rented the apartment for one month and advised the owner that we would be staying for at least six months to a year. About three weeks in when trying to confirm with the owner to come and pick up next month rent, she tells us that the apartment has been rented out to someone else and we are going to have to leave in a week. This was a disgruntle situation and of course there was some disappointment having to try to find a new place to stay with such short notice. However the owner said that she had another place that was actually a friend of hers and she'd be fine with renting us that place for in additional 10% of charge. Without many options we went ahead and took the place
What a huge mistake that was. The building was about 40 years old versus two years old like the place prior. There was only an air conditioner in the living room and none in the bedroom, The bathtub was just that, a bathtub with a hose to rinse off, no curtain just a bathtub in the middle of the floor. It was amazing how we went from 5 star service to two star service, and if that wasn't enough we were paying 10% extra for the two star service. Talking about pain, pain, pain.
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