He Ate Before the Flight
The people who say “that’s just not what that costs” are almost always the ones who could pay it without blinking.
This is The Unconsidered. A weekly newsletter about the things we stopped looking at,
the questions we stopped asking, and what happens when we start again.
A friend of mine flew private out of Teterboro a few years back. Early departure, the sky still deciding what color it wanted to be. He got to the hangar early. The client, the man who owned the plane, got there late.
When he finally walked up, my friend asked where he’d been.
“Grabbed breakfast on the way.”
My friend pointed at the jet. “They serve breakfast on board. It’s included.”
The man nodded. “I know. They wanted $250 for it.
That’s just not what breakfast costs.”
He owns the plane. He could buy the hangar, the runway, and the little town the runway sits in. And he stopped to eat a four-dollar egg sandwich in a strip mall because somewhere in his head, there is a number for what breakfast costs, and the number on the invoice was wrong.
I’ve thought about that sandwich more than I’d like to admit.
The easy read is that he’s cheap. He isn’t. Two hundred and fifty dollars to that man is a rounding error on the fuel. What he was protecting wasn’t his wallet. It was a private ledger, the one that tells him what things are worth, and he keeps it current the way some people keep their blood pressure down. On purpose. With effort. Because the day you stop is the day something else starts doing your pricing for you.
Most of us stopped keeping it.
We pay the markup, and we don’t flinch, because flinching takes attention and attention is the one thing we’ve agreed to spend everywhere except here. A fountain soda costs a restaurant somewhere between a quarter and forty cents, a cup, syrup, and ice, and all. They sell it to you for three or four dollars, and you say yes without hearing the question. That isn’t a scam. The machine is legal, and the soda is cold. It’s just a number that floated up and away from anything real, and we floated up with it.
Say the word 'wedding' out loud to a caterer, and watch the same plate of chicken increase by more than 20% (Consumer Reports once called the same vendors twice, once for a wedding and once for an anniversary party). Same headcount, same room.
A quarter of them quoted more for the wedding. Same chicken. Different sentence.
“Market price.” “Still or sparkling?” “There’s a small convenience fee.” These aren’t prices. They’re the sound a price makes when it’s hoping you won’t ask.
The strange part is who actually does the asking. It’s almost never who you’d expect.
The man on the jet keeps the ledger. Sam Walton drove a beat-up pickup to a company worth more than most countries. The people with the most room to stop noticing the price are, very often, the ones who never stopped. They got rich, in part, by knowing exactly what a thing is worth and refusing to pay extra for the feeling of not caring.
It’s the rest of us who pay for the feeling.
The markup was never a tax on wealth. It’s a tax on wanting to look like you’ve arrived. The $9 airport water, the club’s bottle service, the upgrade nobody needed. You’re not buying the thing. You’re buying a small performance of a man who doesn’t have to check the price. You pay extra to look like the kind of person who wouldn’t notice the extra. The man who actually wouldn’t notice it ate before the flight.
I should tell you that I spent twenty-five years building the machine
that erases the ledger.
That’s the job. Advertising exists to stand between a price and a worth and gently pry them apart, until sugar water costs four dollars and feels like a reward, until a markup feels like membership. I was good at it. I’m not going to apologize for it, exactly. But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t helped install the amnesia I’m now complaining about. I spent a career teaching people to stop doing the math at the precise moment the math would have helped them.
So when I tell you to keep the ledger, understand that I know how the other side works.
I built the other side.
What the man on the jet has isn’t discipline. It’s attention. After all the money, he’s still tracking the gap between what a thing costs and what it’s worth, and he never handed that judgment to the person doing the charging. Most of us did. We let the menu tell us what dinner costs. We let the venue tell us what love costs. We let the algorithm decide what an hour of our evening is worth, and the algorithm said: less than this.
Which means the ledger was never really about the money. It’s whether you’re still doing your own pricing on anything. The job you took. The city you stayed in.
The number in your head for what your time is worth, and whether you set it or just accepted the one you were quoted.
I don’t know what’s on your ledger anymore. I’m not sure I know what’s on mine. I let a lot of prices float up and away while I was busy, and I called it being reasonable, and some of it was, and some of it was just me not wanting to be the guy who stops the line to ask.
The man ate before the flight. He looked at a number, decided it was wrong, and refused it. It cost him a few minutes and a marginally worse sandwich.
He’d tell you it was worth every bit of it. He got to keep the one thing the jet couldn’t include. The price was still his to set.
That’s not a small thing to hold.
But you have to know what it costs.