Part one of a four part series on the pain of paying.
You walked into the store for one white shirt. You walked out with two bags, seven items, and a receipt you did not look at. On the drive home you could not name half of what you bought. If this has happened to you, you are not careless. You are normal. And what happened to you in that store was not an accident. It was the product of one of the most successful engineering projects in the history of business: the systematic removal of the pain of paying.
This article is the story of that project, and of its two great removals. The first removal took fifty years: the slow, clever elimination of the pain of paying, the small sting that once kept every household budget honest. The second removal is happening right now: the elimination of the payer, the human being, from the moment of payment itself. The final step is being built in public, this year, by the largest payment companies in the world, and almost nobody outside the industry is talking about what it takes away.
The small pain that kept budgets honest
In the 1990s, researchers gave a name to something every shopper has felt. Ofer Zellermayer, working with George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon, called it the pain of paying: handing over money produces a feeling close to real discomfort. Drazen Prelec and Loewenstein then showed how this pain works in their 1998 paper The Red and the Black, a study of how our minds keep accounts of spending and debt [1].
The insight is beautiful in its simplicity. The discomfort of paying is not a design flaw in human beings. It is a feature. That small sting at the moment money leaves your hands is a natural brake on spending. It made budgets work before spreadsheets existed. Your grandparents did not resist overspending because they were more disciplined than you. They resisted because every purchase hurt a little, and the hurt arrived at exactly the right moment: before the money was gone.
Then researchers measured what happens when you soften the sting. In 2001, Prelec and Duncan Simester at MIT ran auctions for real, valuable items and found that people instructed to pay by credit card were willing to pay dramatically more than people paying cash, in some conditions up to twice as much [2]. Same item. Same people. Same wallets, ultimately. The only difference was how much the payment would hurt, and that difference alone moved the price people would accept by up to 100 percent.
Read that finding the way a retailer would. If the pain of paying is a brake, then every reduction in that pain is an accelerator. And accelerators are worth money.
Act one: the store learned to numb you before the science had a name
Retailers did not wait for the academic papers. They discovered the brake by experiment, decades earlier, and quietly built the modern store around defeating it.
Consider what actually happens between the front door and the checkout. You are invited to touch everything, and this is not hospitality. Research by Joann Peck and Suzanne Shu found that merely touching an object increases your feeling that you already own it, and that this feeling of ownership makes you willing to pay more for it [3]. The fitting room works the same way but stronger: for a few minutes, the clothes are yours. Putting them back now feels like a loss, and human beings hate losses far more than they enjoy gains.
The path through the store is engineered too. Paco Underhill, who spent decades filming shoppers for major retail chains, documented the craft in his book Why We Buy: the longer a shopper stays, and the more items a shopper touches and carries, the more the shopper spends, so stores are built to slow you down and load you up [4]. This is why the basics you actually came for are at the back, why the basket finds your hand within the first minute, and why the store feels pleasant in a way your own home somehow does not at that hour.
None of this is a conspiracy, and this article accuses no one of breaking any law. Every technique is legal, most are decades old, and many readers who work in retail will recognize them as simply good merchandising. That is exactly the point. Softening the brake was never a crime. It was a craft. You went in for a shirt and came out with ten items because a great many intelligent people, over many years, worked very hard on the gap between what you planned and what you carried out. Their work targeted the first half of the brake: the moment of deciding.
The second half of the brake, the moment of paying, took longer to defeat. That is act two.
Act two: the payment was numbed one step at a time
Follow the arc of payment innovation over five decades and a pattern appears that is almost too neat.
Cash hurt the most, so cards replaced cash, and the MIT auctions showed what that alone was worth: up to twice the willingness to pay [2]. Signatures and PIN codes still forced a pause, so the tap arrived, and the pause shrank to half a second. Typing card numbers online created just enough friction to abandon a shopping cart, so in 1999 Amazon patented one click ordering, turning the entire act of payment into a single motion [5]. Then even the single motion was removed for anything recurring: the subscription simply takes the money, every month, with no motion at all.
Each step was sold to us, honestly, as convenience. Each step also turned down the brake a little further, and the numbers say the brake mattered. When researchers asked American consumers to guess their monthly subscription spending and then counted the real figure, the average guess was 86 dollars. The real figure was 219 dollars [6]. That gap of 133 dollars a month is not stupidity. It is anesthesia working as designed: money that leaves without a moment of pain also leaves without a moment of memory.
Buy now, pay later products refined the technique further by slicing whatever pain remained into four small doses. The United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau studied the market and found that by 2022, about one in five consumers with a credit record used these loans, that lenders were receiving more than a million applications a day, and that 63 percent of borrowers held multiple loans at the same time during the year [7]. Nearly two thirds of the volume went to people whose credit was already stretched [7]. A payment method that hurts less does not just move one purchase. It moves the whole household balance sheet.
By 2025, one honest sentence could summarize fifty years of payment progress: every innovation that succeeded made paying feel like less, and no innovation that made paying feel like more ever survived. The brake had one component left: a human being, present at the moment of purchase, performing one small gesture. Reaching for the phone. Tapping the card.
That half second is what act three removes.
Act three: the last gesture
In April 2025, Mastercard announced Agent Pay, technology that lets AI agents complete purchases on their own, built with Microsoft and IBM [8]. Visa launched Intelligent Commerce, which embeds payment credentials and controls directly into transactions started by AI agents, with OpenAI as a named partner [9]. In September 2025, OpenAI and Stripe published an open protocol for agent driven commerce and switched on instant checkout inside ChatGPT [10].
These systems are marvels of engineering, and they will do real good: they will hunt down better prices, cancel forgotten subscriptions, and handle the tedious work of buying. I have spent over two decades building technology in financial services, and I want to be clear that the people building these rails are solving hard problems well, with real attention to security and consent.
But notice what the agent removes. The payer. For the first time since money existed, the human is not present at the moment of payment. Not present physically, not present digitally, not present at all. There is no gesture. There is no half second. The purchase happens the way your heartbeat happens: reliably, silently, and without consulting you.
The pain of paying cannot brake a payment you never feel. Fifty years of design turned the brake down. The agent unbolts it from the car.
So who holds the brake now?
Here is the part that should occupy every regulator, every banker, and every household: the brake does not actually disappear. It changes hands.
An agent that spends on your behalf runs on rules. Someone writes those rules: how much it may spend, on what, how often, and when it must stop and ask you. Someone chooses the defaults, and defaults, as every behavioral scientist knows, are destiny, because almost nobody changes them. Someone decides what the agent shows you afterward: an itemized account that recreates a little healthy pain, or a soothing monthly summary designed to be scrolled past.
Whoever writes those rules holds your brake. And the candidates have interestingly different motives. The merchant, who pays a fee on every agent purchase, prospers when the agent buys more. The platform running the agent earns its share on the same flow [10]. Your bank, at least in principle, carries a duty of care and answers to a regulator. You yourself hold the brake only if the controls are real, visible, and yours to set, rather than buried defaults you will never find.
The honest answer today is that this question is being settled right now, in protocol documents and partnership announcements, by companies negotiating with each other, while the person whose money is at stake is not at the table. The card networks, to their credit, have published consumer control and consent features as core parts of their designs [8][9]. Whether those controls become the steering wheel or the fine print will be decided in the next few years, and it will be decided by whoever shows up to the discussion.
For fifty years, the pain of paying quietly protected people who never knew it existed. It asked for no regulation, no app, and no willpower. It simply hurt, a little, at exactly the right moment. We are the first generation to switch it off completely, and we are running the experiment on ourselves, at full scale, with no control group.
The store took your attention. The card took your restraint. The subscription took your memory. The agent takes your presence. What remains is the household itself: the family budget, the savings account, the quiet arithmetic of ordinary life. What happens there when nobody in the family feels the spending anymore? That is the subject of the next article in this series.
References
[1] D. Prelec and G. Loewenstein, "The Red and the Black: Mental Accounting of Savings and Debt," Marketing Science, 1998. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Red-and-the-Black:-Mental-Accounting-of-Savings-Prelec-Loewenstein/95de9bc21ac973324399de5fb4d262a8f4079dba
[2] D. Prelec and D. Simester, "Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit Card Effect on Willingness to Pay," Marketing Letters, vol. 12, pp. 5 to 12, February 2001. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008196717017
[3] J. Peck and S. B. Shu, "The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership," Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 36, October 2009, summarized in ScienceDaily, "Buyer Beware: Touching Something In A Store Increases Perceived Ownership," March 2009. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090331112723.htm
[4] P. Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Simon and Schuster, 1999 (updated edition 2008).
[5] United States Patent 5,960,411, "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network" (the Amazon one click patent), granted September 28, 1999.
[6] C+R Research subscription spending survey of 1,000 consumers, as reported by CNBC, "Consumers spend an average $133 more each month on subscriptions than they realize," June 2, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/consumers-spend-133-more-monthly-on-subscriptions-than-they-realize.html
[7] Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, "Consumer Use of Buy Now, Pay Later and Other Unsecured Consumer Credit Products," January 2025. https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_BNPL_Report_2025_01.pdf
[8] Mastercard, "Mastercard Unveils Agent Pay, Pioneering Agentic Payments Technology to Power Commerce in the Age of AI," press release, April 29, 2025. https://www.mastercard.com/news/press/2025/april/mastercard-unveils-agent-pay-pioneering-agentic-payments-technology-to-power-commerce-in-the-age-of-ai/
[9] Visa, "Visa Intelligent Commerce," visa.com. https://www.visa.com/en-us/solutions/intelligent-commerce
[10] OpenAI, "Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol," September 29, 2025. https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/