“Most people get sucked into a habit. Once we pay a certain price a few times, we stop asking questions about whether it’s reasonable and we just assume it’s the right amount.”
From a U.S. News & World Report Q&A, in which the author of The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home discusses that everyday product, coffee:
It’s very hard for people to figure out what’s the right amount to pay for coffee…
We’ve done some amusing experiments with coffee. In one of them, we gave people coffee, then we gave them an additive that nobody ever uses with coffee. Like cumin or saffron. We wanted to know what would happen if you serve those additives in really fancy metal and glass containers as opposed to hand cups or Styrofoam cups. People drank the coffee and nobody ever put these additives in. But just the existence of the glass and metal containers make people think the coffee is better and pay more for it. Coffee is a good analogy for many things in life. The experience is ambiguous. But it tells us the range of acceptable experience is incredibly wide.