Think about why Netflix feels painless but renting movies did not.

It's not the total cost. Most of us spend more on Netflix in a year than we ever did at Blockbuster. It's that Netflix asks you to decide to pay once.

Blockbuster asked every Friday night. Each rental was a fresh "should I?" Each one stung a little. Behavioral economists call that sting the pain of paying.

Prelec and Loewenstein showed that the act of paying carries its own cost, separate from the money. It's why all-inclusive resorts feel relaxing and why per-minute phone bills always felt worse than they should.

I often consider this when I look at how stores handle bundles.

A customer buys your serum and loves it. Three weeks later they come back for the moisturizer. A month after that, the eye cream. Three purchases, three decision moments and three chances to lose them.

Offer those three as one bundle on the first visit, and you collapse three decisions into one. That's one point of friction instead of three.

The data backs this up: bundle customers have 2.7x the lifetime value of single-item buyers (Forrester). Not mainly because they spend more per order. Because they stick around.

The strange part is that most stores already have everything they need to build the right bundle. Pull your repeat customers and for everyone who bought twice, look at what they bought first and what they bought second. There's almost always a dominant pair: 30 to 40% of repeat buyers (our data) follow the same first-to-second product sequence. That sequence could be your starter bundle. This helps you package what customers already want, just earlier and in one decision.