Our readers ask. A reader in the old town writes: «The courier's price list says $4.50 plus 62 cents a kilometre. My neighbour says that means a one-kilometre delivery costs 62 cents. That cannot be right, because I was charged more. Which of us has misread it?»
Your neighbour has, and it is the most common misreading of any price list in the city.
There are two numbers on that price list and they do completely different jobs. The $4.50 is the base fee. It pays for the call-out — the rider coming to your door at all — and you pay it once, whether the parcel travels one kilometre or nine.
The 62 cents is a rate. It is charged for each additional kilometre, and it is the only part of the bill that moves. That is not the same as the price of a delivery. A one-kilometre delivery costs $4.50 plus 62 cents — that is $5.12, which is very likely the figure on your receipt.
Ten kilometres, by the same reading, costs $4.50 plus $6.20, or $10.70 in total. Notice what that does to the average: your ten-kilometre parcel travelled at $1.07 a kilometre, and your one-kilometre parcel at $5.12 a kilometre, from the same price list. Neither of those averages is the 62 cents.
So the number in the advertisement answers one question only: what happens to the bill when the journey gets one kilometre longer. It is a statement about change, not about total — and every argument we get letters about comes from mixing up those two.