What's your price?

Yesterday, I went to the Prince concert. And had a great time, I might add.

I originally purchased 3 tickets, one for me, one for my friend, and one for her daughter. Right before we left for the concert, my friend's daughter decided that she didn't want to go. No biggie.

So I'm thinking that we can try to sell the extra ticket when we get to the concert. Not trying to make any extra money, just wanted to get back what I paid...$25.00

So we get there and sure enough there's a guy who needs a ticket. Cool!

I tell him that I have one and he gets his money out. He hands me the money and as I go to hand him the ticket I notice that he's only given me $10.00

"Umm, excuse me", I said, "the ticket price is $25.00".

I take the ticket back and hand him his $10 bill.

He looks at me and says, "You don't want the money?"

I said, "I'm willing to sell you the ticket, but not for $10.00, I paid $25.00 and that's the price that I'm selling it for."

He looks at me like I'm from another planet and says,"Green is better than paper. So you mean to tell me you'd rather lose $25.00 and keep a useless ticket, than to take $10.00 for it?"

I said,"Yep. That's right. I'm either going to sell it to you for what I paid, or I'm not selling it."

He just stood there in amazement and continued with his rant of "Green is better than paper"...

Well I took my paper, walked away, and went on into the concert.

Now I realize that 99% of people would have taken his money and would opt to lose only $15 instead of $25.
Now I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not even "well off". Like most in today's economy, I'm living "hand to mouth", and I'm just one paycheck away from being homeless. Nevertheless, for me though, it's not always about the money.

Number 1...I didn't like his attitude. I had something that he wanted. He should've been a little nicer about his approach.

Number 2...the ticket had my name on it and I didn't feel comfortable giving this rude stranger anything with my name on it.

Number 3...in the end, my hope was that he never found anyone else with an extra ticket and was left to realize that he should've paid me the price I was asking. I wasn't trying to "get over" on him, I was just trying to make my money back.

So, I'm $25.00 in the hole which just means that I'll have to find $25.00 worth of something that we'll have to do without. And that will be my price to pay for the ticket.

But that incident left me wondering, Let the DIALOGUE begin! What would YOU have done? Taken the $10 or walked away as I did?

Talk to me!

Til next time...