Out of curiosity I felt like getting the communities opinion on the following hypothetical situation. Please respond instinctively (try to answer right after reading the question) before trying to rationalize it.

Say you are a skilled worker, and you have a good paying job that pays you 40$ an hour, even though you do have a good job it is still hard at times to get by. You are also a home-owner who routinely has to do his/her lawn. Say it takes you one hour to mow the lawn.
I'm a neighborhood kid trying to make a couple of bucks and I offer to mow your lawn for 10$ dollars, you find this to be a good deal since your hour is worth more then 10$ so you agree to pay me. You are never there to witness me mowing your law, but you are always content with my work so you continue to hire me since you feel you are getting a great bargain.
Time passes by and you find out that I actually have a large slew of customers in which I'm able to do 8 lawns per hour making the equivalent of 80$ per hour, you have no idea how its possible that I can even reach that many customers but I do somehow someway.

I know how large my yard is, and I know about how long it takes. It takes about the same time for me, or for my wife, and it takes about 1.5x as long for my kids to mow.

If you have some method of making the work faster, more power to you.

If you sub-contract that out to somebody else I WOULD be concerned because I hired you to do the work, not let the work out to another. That in itself gets into a messy contracting legal issue, far beyond the scope of this kind of thread.


It is the same thing for most services, not just yard care.

I will give a tip to a restaurant server based on the service I received, not based on how many tables they are waiting. If they somehow manage to provide quality service to many tables at once then by all means they deserve the money they receive; it is much more likely that the quality of service is inversely proportional to the number of tables, but if they figured out some way to do more with less then let them have the reward.

I paid for the job, not the hour. Contractors make a bid for the project you are paying them for, and if they can get the bid down is less time then they estimated, that's fine by me. If they deliberately overestimate in expectation that something might go wrong and slow them down, that's actually beneficial for me, since the time-frame I'm given is the "worst case" scenario.
The only way I'd feel ripped off is if they rushed the job and the quality suffered as a result, or if they missed one or two points that we had agreed upon.
Example: We had some contractors lay a bunch of flooring down recently, and they missed a few pieces of floor trim they were supposed to install that was part of their job. We didn't bother calling them back for it though, because we could install it just as easily ourselves in less than half an hour, and they did a quality job elsewhere on the project, so we want to keep a good working relationship with them for future projects.
However, if they missed trim and did a poor-quality job on the flooring installed, we would demand they return and fix it according to what we agreed to, or else we'd go with some other contractor in the future.

But if the job was done satisfactorily, and the only thing different from the bid is that they got it done in time, but somehow was working on other projects at the same time, that's not my business. The bid was, get x done for y money in z amount of time. If they met those requirements, I don't care if they could've cut z time in half or not, our agreement was for z amount of time (and not z/2), so I'm happy.

Many contractors work on multiple projects simultaneously. Want to know why building highway onramps or re-laying roads take so long? The contractors deliberately stretch out the project three or four times longer than necessary... with full understanding and agreement with the government, to the benefit of both the contractor and the government - the contractor can work on multiple projects at once and, for example, lay asphalt on multiple roads during one asphalt-laying spree or working on more time-critical projects while the weather is right, benefiting the contractor, and the government saves money on the bid by permitting a longer project time than is normally reasonable. Laying a road does not take 3-5 months, it takes 3-4 weeks. The bid, in agreement with both parties, was for an extended time frame (benefiting party A) at less cost (benefiting party B).

With the contractors laying flooring in my house - the same week they were doing that, they were also installing something (I don't know the details of it) at another person's house for another project. The head contractor went there to work on that, and left his two sub-contractors to finish a sub-project he assigned them, and came back four hours later to check over the work. Fine by me! He agreed to get the project finished in a week, and succeeding in doing so. As long as my side of the deal doesn't suffer (costing more than I agreed to, or taking longer than I agreed to, or lesser quality than I agreed to), not only "What right do I have to complain?" but also, why should I even be bothered by that?
Ofcourse I know that if I wanted, I could pay him 50% more to get the entire project done within 24 hours by him working through the night (money motivates), and ofcourse he'd be willing to do so if I paid him 50% or 100% more. But I chose to take his normal bid, and it taking a week doesn't harm me (but it taking 100% more cost to get it done in 24 hours might harm me financially more than I feel the project is worth to me - but it taking a week long is still with the worth of the project to me personally).

We actually did give them some small increase in pay to make sure they got it done in time for family visiting - but that was known in advance and part of the understanding of the bid before the project even began - we paid a little extra to move the beginning of the project forward two weeks, not to shorten the length of the project, but it's the same idea - and all things that need to be nailed down in the initial bid, and a copy of the agreed final bid sent to both parties (by email in our case, but for a more serious project, signed contracts would be better).

The thing is I see a lot of people on the internet (I should probably stop visiting those sites) griefing over executives being paid so much money. But if these executives weren't known for being paid so well would they still complain?
It reminds me of something that happened in ultimate-guitar.com a while back. They developed a slew of new apps for people to learn some of their favorite songs, obviously they had to hire some developers and acquire some rights to certain music, this obviously costed them $$$. So they announced on the frontpage, that they were adding new features that costed in the range of 3$ to 5$ (they were not removing any old features). The community was in uproar! out of 100 comments 95% of them were bashing ultimate-guitar for being money hungry, the other 5% understood that they put in work for these new products and should be compensated appropriately.

So basically this poll in general is to try to better understand peoples mindset when it comes to fair pricing. Is it because people feel they are entitled to more then other people? Is it because they are feeling cheated? Me personally I feel like im in the 5% so I cant understand what makes the other 95% outraged at being charged, I pay for my music, I pay for my software (as much as it might pain me sometimes) because I understand that developers arent cheap, services cost money, and peoples time have value.

So basically this poll in general is to try to better understand peoples mindset when it comes to fair pricing. Is it because people feel they are entitled to more then other people? Is it because they are feeling cheated?

It confuses me how many people complain about the prices of iPhone apps, "What do you mean it costs more than $1, you monster?! Clearly your RPG that took a year to develop should cost the same as that fart application someone knocked together in 24 hours."

Yet those same people actually own iPhones in the first place, which they get tricked into paying $1500 for, on top of their already bloated $1400 phone bill. Regular bloated phone bill, plus an extra [color=#ff0000]$40 a month for a not-unlimited data plan (equaling $940 in data fees over a two year contract), plus $200 or $300 (originally $500+) for the phone itself.

People gripe about the big business fees ($60 for a new game, monthly online fees, and poor DLC practices? That's just as stupid as the $1 app pricing), but pay up anyway because it's cool and popular and convenient, but then rob and vocally lambaste the small business people, because they have the power to.

[size=2][This post was not written from an iPhone]

It confuses me how many people complain about the prices of iPhone apps, "What do you mean it costs more than $1, you monster?! Clearly your RPG that took a year to develop should cost the same as that fart application someone knocked together in 24 hours."

Worth noting for me at least is that it costing more than $1 isn't a dealbreaker, it's the fact that it costs more than $1 and I have no guarantees of quality. There are a couple solid sites for mobile reviews, but not all apps get reviewed, and not all of them get reviewed with serious depth. The customer reviews section can be helpful, but it's fairly common for customer reviews to pad games favorably early on due to marketing firms publishing artificial reviews.

I think that's my largest problem with all mobile stores right now. I had no problem throwing down $7 to play Infinity Blade 2 on my friend's iPad/apple account/whatever, because I knew what to expect.