Smokin’!

British American Tobacco gave their first press conference in ten years. And boy are they out of practice. Mind you what a job being their spokesperson. They pay you for ten years and you don’t have to do anything.

According to the spokesman for BAT, and please follow me here, plain packaging will lead to more chop chop shops. This will therefore lead to cheaper contraband cigarettes, which will lead to an increase of smoking, which will force them to lower the price and therefore meet the demand?

What? If you are going to have more smokers, wouldn’t that increase the market, therefore increase demand, and therefore increase the cost? The ONLY reason they would lower the price is because demand would drop off. This is Big Tobacco here, not a not for profit NGO. If they thought that there would be more smokers, they would be dancing on their desks.

Previously, big tobacco had made the claim that plain packaging would do nothing to curtail demand of their product.

Today, the spokesman Scott McIntyre made it quite clear that this is not true.

“If they take away our brands and our trademarks it (price) will be the only place left.”

It will have an effect. Enough for them to worry enough about their market share to threaten a cut in their own profits to maintain that share.

If the coalition wanted evidence that plain packaging WILL work, here it is.

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A. Ghebranious  2011  (All Rights Reserved)