well chep is not so true anymore, sending $10 and paying $1 is not what i call cheap, that is 10% of your transaction, paypal is only chargin 3.5%....
if you paid $1 as fee (specially on a $10 transaction) that means you are doing a lot of things wrong. I just double checked with my Electrum wallet. in order to pay $1= ~0.0088
BTC you need to have 4-5 outputs to spend which means you have received $2 and $2.5 transactions and you need to think of another way of receiving so many small payments in your wallet.
and this calculation is done with the highest current fee. you may have included lower fee/byte which means you had much more outputs to spend!
p.s. the current cost of a normal transaction is still 40 US cents.