Zip cord
Gene, 20¢ a foot may be a little high, but not necessarily a rip-off. You'll have to admit that it does have some non-electrical advantages as outlined below. Yeah, a little high for what we can use for speaker wire, but a lot cheaper than what they do try to rip off the "golden-eared" boys with. Some of those cables get into the thousands of dollars for just a few feet. If there's a market for such things, I'm in the wrong business. But then, I'm also a very honest person, so could never do that to folks.
Doofster, if you see that same type of speaker cable at Wal-Mart, just walk over to the electrical wiring area of Wal-Mart and check the price of the zip cord in comparison. Zip cord looks just like the speaker wire except that it's usually incased in brown vinyl vs. transparent. The "speaker" wire is a bit easier to use in that it usually has one conductor that's unplated stranded copper while the other conductor is tinned stranded copper, so identifying the polarity is easy. The lamp cord or "zip" cord (so called because you can simply "zip" the two conductors apart from each other) has conductors that are identical. The only way you can discern a polarity is by carefully looking at the outide of the insulation for one or more ribs that one conductor has that the other doesn't. If you're lucky, one conductor's insulation will be literally corduroy-like in ribs while the other is smooth.
Dean