How much is a cup worth?

Today as I was riding my Uber to work, I started to chat with a driver, and he explained to me that many people nowadays use User as a local courier – price is the same and delivery time is dramatically shorter, plus you don’t have to go to the courier office. Intrigued by this fact, I asked him if he ever had any ridiculous delivery, he laughed and said:

“There was this girl, she gave me a bag of plastic cups and sent them to her sister that had a garden party in the different districts, I always laugh at this because a bag of plastic cups is worth like a $0.50, and delivery cost was $10. Even better, when I arrived to set the destination, her sister was waiting for me outside and proceeded to thank me, can you imagine? They over-paid like ten times for plastic cups and were still thanking me!”

And that’s an interesting point, while usually price of plastic cups is equal to something around 50 cents, to this lady’s sister in this particular situation cups were worth much more, as she was more than happy to pay 10x the price for the same product. So while the product stayed the same, the perceived value raised dramatically due to the context.

Now imagine the prices you could charge if you just changed a context you could put your services in.