Priced by the hour

A sign painter in Ismailia still letters shopfronts by hand. A hardware shop owner asks him for a new board over the door, and he works out the price the way he always has: two days of work, the paint, the board, a little on top.

It is an honest way to think. It is also backwards.

The shop owner is not buying two days of a painter's time. He is buying the thing that makes a stranger on the pavement stop and look up. He is buying ten years of people finding the shop, of the name being remembered, of the place looking cared for. If the sign brings in a handful of extra customers a week, it pays for itself many times over before the paint fades.

None of that is in the painter's sum. His sum describes his side of the counter.

It feels fair to start with cost because cost is the part we know. We know how long the job took and what the materials were. We feel we can defend that number. What the work is worth to someone else is harder to see and feels presumptuous to name.

But value was never stored inside the work like heat inside a stone. It shows up in the exchange, in how much a particular person would give, in effort or money, to have it. The same sign is worth a great deal over a busy shop and very little over a closed one.

This does not mean charging whatever can be squeezed. It means starting the conversation in the right place: with the buyer, and what changes for them.

Cost sets the floor. Worth sets the price.