You're right, business should not work like that.
I forgot to mention, bitcoin isn't in the best condition at the moment due to scale problems.
It's really the worst time to do a transaction using bitcoin, I'm sorry for your bad experience with bitcoin but you can check two things before transact using bitcoin.
First; how much unconfirmed transactions on the mempool (
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions). It's over 168K but normally less than 50K which indicate less fee to be paid, if it less than 20K or less than 10K unconfirmed transactions, you may pay only a few cents to send $250 worth of bitcoin.
Second; check recommended bitcoin fees at
https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ it's 650 sats/byte right now.
For the median transaction size of 226 bytes, this results in a fee of 146,900 satoshis. or equal to
BTC0.00146 = $22.24