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It’s become commonplace to argue that consumers are much more savvy than they used to be. They shop around a lot more, compare prices. They use the internet to see where the best deals are. Well, if that’s true, what do you do if you’re a supplier trying to sell to one of these price-conscious savvy consumers? What you try and do is you try and disguise the full price that people are paying. You give them a great headline offer but there’s some backdoor way in which you can claim revenue from them.

The credit card companies are a good example. They found that they could give low interest rate headline offers, but they could collect money in more subtle ways. They could have complicated ways in which new purchasers paid a higher rate of interest and any money you used to pay off the card paid the low rates of interest loan off first. You got the money in the end.

Well don’t be surprised if manufacturers and others want to try and get more money from us, they’ve got to earn their penny in a competitive world. But the good news for consumers is that all this confusion pricing that we’re bombarded with it doesn’t work for very long, and the case of Ryanair is a very good example.

Ryanair perfected the art of having bolt-ons to the basic headline price that you pay when you book the ticket. Does that work? Are we fooled by Ryanair? No, of course not, everybody knows when they go to the Ryanair website that there’s a dozen little bits and bobs that’ll be paid in addition to the fare that they quote you at the beginning of the purchase of the ticket.

So, yes, we’re going to get it and we’re going to have to deal in modern life with competitors trying to wean little bits of extra revenue from us, but no, it’s not going to fool us for very long.

That’s my view. You can join the debate with the Open University.