I'm thinking of selling my car, but if I do I'm not flogging it at a basic price o.n.c.o. - you know, the simple way. Naah! I'm going to do it the travel agent way, so the price will go along the following lines... R4,000 (but that covers only the tyres and rims). You will also have to pay another R96,000 (body, engine, transmission, doors, aircon, power-steering, windows, seats, CD player, steering wheel and stompie-filled ashtray). The total price will then be R100,000. When I place my advertisement, the R4,000 will be very big, and the R96,000 much smaller and the total price (R100,000) the smallest of the lot - barely visible, in fact. Well, if the travel agents can do it, why can't I? Quite frankly, why airfares are marketed in such a round-about way puzzles me. Most of us are used to opening the weekend newspapers and seeing flights to London for unbelievably low rates - this last weekend one company's prices were under R1000. That was printed in very large type, but was followed, in much smaller type, by the taxes, and in the smallest type of the lot, the total cost - which was around the R5-6,000 mark. Surely, by now people are used to it and immediately disregard the basic cost and go straight to the total. Right? But the travel agents persist (I'm sure there's a plausible reason, but I'm hanged if I can get it) and if advertisers in other fields took the same flight path as the travel agents, we'd spend half our time working out the real cost of a can of baked beans and the other half chirping at the cashier because we didn't realise the true price. Can't we just keep it simple, guys?

Rod Baker, guest columnist - rod@bizcommunity.com All retail news to: retailnews@bizcommunity.com Responses to this column welcomed in our new online editor's column archive.