I got caught by that a few days ago as well. Took over 14 hours using the 0.005 BTC transaction fee that is set in the Electrum Bitcoin wallet I use mostly. The second time I did a transaction and was aware of this I used an online wallet which automatically suggested to pay about $1 to get the "normal" transaction time. On a $5 transaction. So this really put me off Bitcoin for the moment as an actually usable currency.

Which is a shame, Bitcoin has become accepted at so many places that it was really getting there to become a viable alternative to PayPal. I'm sure this issue will go away at some point, but I'm also sure there is going to be a next time when things get as bad as this and that is unacceptable for widespread adoption.

So it's a very good thing that there is healthy competition on the crypto coin market and there are also now multiple payment providers who make it trivial for a company to accept payment with multiple coins not just Bitcoin, so it's not as hard anymore for an alternative coin to get as widely accepted as a payment method as it used to be.