How Much Are the Little Things Worth?

One of the little things that occasionally fascinates me is how merchants decide what to charge for little things that aren't on the menu. This morning, at the deli where I buy my coffee, a woman asked to buy a little tub of butter. (Not peanut butter.) She had to explain a couple of times that no, she did not want a bagel with the butter, she just wanted butter, by itself, and how much would that cost, like 50 cents or something? When she got to the cash register and had to again explain that she just was buying that little tub of butter, the cashiers had a little consultation about how much to charge her, and quickly decided on 20 cents. As was revealed in the peanut butter post linked above, this deli charges 10 cents to put butter on a bagel. So I guess they decided that the little plastic container is worth charging an extra 10 cents for.

I can think of similar situations-- the time I paid $1.00 to use a bathroom, for instance. And also a couple of visits to a neighborhood cobbler shop: once I went in with a bag that needed to have a torn part sewn. I think he charged me $2 for that. Then another time I wanted an extra hole punched in a belt, and he did that for free. It wasn't like I was a regular customer or anything, he was just a nice man. And I'll always remember that, as the sad part of that story is that he was murdered during a robbery several months later.

Anyway, it's the kind of thing Malcolm Gladwell could have written about in Blink: how do you make a split-second decision on how much money something is worth?