Somebody dies on a Tuesday.
By Wednesday afternoon a family is sitting in a quiet room with soft lighting, being shown caskets, making eleven financial decisions in ninety minutes, while nobody in the room has slept.
The total comes to $9,400 and not one person asks a question about it.
Now consider what that transaction actually is, stripped of everything else.
A major purchase. Made once or twice in a lifetime. With no price research. Under extreme time pressure. By a buyer in acute emotional distress. Where negotiating feels like an insult to someone you loved.
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If you set out to design the most favorable conditions a seller could ever operate in, you would design exactly this.
And here is the part that makes it genuinely interesting. The federal government noticed, decades ago, and wrote a rule specifically to fix it.
That rule gives you the right to a printed price list. The right to buy individual items instead of a package. The right to prices over the phone.
Almost nobody uses any of it.
Not because the rule is weak. Because of when the purchase happens.