{
  "id": "pain-at-the-pump.felt-price",
  "term": "pain at the pump",
  "sense": "felt-price",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 16,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "One price that members of a collective self see daily and read as the sign of all their walls, so its rise reads as every wall moving nearer.",
  "folk_gloss": "the hardship people feel from high fuel prices",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "collective-self.shared",
      "measure.quantitative",
      "price.economic",
      "member.social",
      "see.visual",
      "daily.temporal",
      "read.information",
      "sign.symbolic",
      "wall.range-end",
      "rise.movement",
      "motion.movement",
      "near.spatial"
    ],
    "interaction": "A price seen daily is easy to read, so the collective self uses it as the instrument for all its walls; a rise in it reads as the whole window narrowing, whatever other prices do.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "one price standing for the whole window",
      "a reading instrument chosen by how often it is seen"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Fuel prices are shown in large numbers on roadside signs, so drivers see them change more often than most prices they pay.",
      "domain": "economics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "pocketbook-issues.felt",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "pocketbook issues are the parameters; the pain at the pump is one price read as all of them"
    },
    {
      "id": "economic-anxiety.unlocated",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "the felt price locates what economic anxiety leaves unlocated"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "pain at the pump",
    "price of eggs",
    "the price of eggs"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-pain-at-the-pump.felt-price"
}