I once asked my delightful father-in-law to explain that thing about wine to me.
You know, can a bottle that cost $200 in a top restaurant really be twenty times as good as a bottle that you can get for a fiver at the local shop? His answer was interesting.
He said that you aren't paying for the wine alone.
What you are paying for is the ambience, the service, the location, the wine waiter's expertise, the good company, the fine tablecloths, the privacy and discretion, the style and class, the tradition, the food and the trust, the humidity and storage, the tone and the surroundings, the fellow dining guests and the great conversation.
The wine is almost an irrelevance and that's the point.
We think we know the price of something.
But the value can spread out far beyond all of that.
I have an old Mercedes car.
I didn't pay much for it.
You never do, as people are scared of them in case they go wrong, and fair enough they do cost a fortune to put right but you need to remember that because they are better made, they rarely do go wrong.
I was visited by a friend who was driving a brand new car he'd just bought.
A modern Eurobox, a small hatchback thing that looked like a mini spaceship.
He looked at my old, battered, mud-streaked Merc and exclaimed, 'you must be doing well!' I tried to explain that wasn't the case and that he'd probably paid at least five times for his what I'd paid for mine but he wouldn't have it.
He saw the Merc and had decided its value was a lot more than the price - i.
e.
what was actually paid for it.
I learnt that day about price not necessarily equating to perceived value.
Remember too that something is only worth what others are willing to pay for it.
A catalogue may say the value of a painting is $500 but that's only true if somebody is willing to pay that amount for it.
An important lesson to learn.
The price of something can be far less than its actual value, either to you or to somebody else, or a lot more.