Whats with the increasing price of a pack of cigarettes?
Ok, i will admit that i have been a cigarette smoker for 50 years. i do not plan on quitting, so please do not go there. when i was 16, a pack of cigarettes cost 25 cents. when i was 17, the price rose to 35 cents. i vowed to quit smoking, if cigarette prices increased again. one year later, they leaped to 50 cents a pack. i should have kept my promise to quit smoking, at that time. anyway, i am now paying around $45 dollars for a carton of cigarettes. thats about $4.39 cents a pack! what happened? did the cost of additives increase? did the fire safe cigarette papers cost more for us not to burn ourselves to death? did the CEOs need a raise? someone please enlighten me as to why, today, one cigarette costs almost 25 cents, the price of a whole pack of cigarettes, when i was a teenager?
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Inflation combined with the fact that they’re addictive, so even if you charge $4 a pack, people will still buy them. The cigarette companies just want to make money, so they’ll charge as much as they can get away with in order to make the biggest profit possible no matter how cheap they are to manufacture.
That’s the man trying to bring us down!!! That’s just my opinion! :-)
Whenever a government needs money they increase the taxes on the cigarettes. They do it because smoking is now considered even more evil than molesting children and only smokers will complain.
You don’t see this with alcohol because you’d have a bunch of drunks tearing up the towns.
@john65pennington Holy cow only $45 for a carton?!? Consider yourself lucky my friend! :-) Ours are $50 to $55 on average. It’s crazy!!!
I just paid $7 for a pack of Camel cigarettes the other night… ludicrous! Cigarettes are always the first things to be taxed because it’s now considered so socially unacceptable to smoke that nonsmokers won’t argue with the tax increase. It blows.
@john65pennington I remember the quarter-a-pack days. I also remember pulling away from the pump when it was 33 cents a gallon because it was too high. I also remember as a kid when a quarter could buy me a Coke (2 cent deposit included) and three candy bars!
This is ridiculous. People here complaining on the cost of cigarettes. They should increase the price further to stop people doing this disgusting habit. How about giving that money to people who are starving and poor? I just can’t believe what I’m reading.
I notice it too. Packs here cost like five to seven bucks, and in Winnipeg certain brands went up to almost eleven.
I don’t know what the reason is, but prices for everything always increase everywhere.
Smokes in Alberta cost about $12 a pack and a carton- 200 cigs- is abot $95. Another reason to stick to quitting.
@TooBlue and you have no disgusting habits?!?!
@TooBlue Very self righteous answer there Sport!
@TILA_ABs_NoMore Yeah, but they don’t include suffocating the lungs of people around me.
@TooBlue There are a hell of alot more places that cater to non-smokers than smokers so that’s a load of crap. Sorry…but us disgusting smokers still have rights and until we are stripped of them then you can just keep your distance. @john65pennington mentioned that he didnt need a lecture and neither do we!!!
And btw…just because I smoke doesnt mean I dont have enough to give to “the people who are starving and poor”. I do my part. When was the last time YOU did?
Let us hope those “rights” are stripped away soon then hey?
@TooBlue Yes, let’s hope so. And then alcohol should be next. I don’t want to be hit by a drunk driver, or withstand the stench of a drunk standing next to me.
Next stop is sweets because they’re bad for your health. I believe NY has already outlawed (or tried to outlaw) a type of cooking fat. They didn’t go far enough.
Cars should be outlawed, too. Pumping out that disgusting exhaust. And trucks. And buses. And coal powered power plants. We’re all breathing that crap in.
And please, oh God, please, outlaw patchouli.
I would vote for no patchouli. Who does like that?
@faye Hippies. And people who sell the stuff at Grateful Dead concerts.
@mrentropy GA. Hell let’s outlaw the Internet too, haha.
@Symbeline Thank you.
What I’m trying to say is, once you start letting the government tell you what you can and can’t do (in certain situations, granted), then it’s not going to stop. Something that you might like to do could be next because “it’s not good for you.”
Even if I wasn’t a smoker I’d feel the same way. I don’t think it’s the governments place, for example, to tell a restaurant owner that they can’t allow smokers in their establishment. It should be up to the restaurant owner to make that decision and be allowed to enforce that decision.
The same thing goes for these arbitrary taxes. If the state bungles their budget it shouldn’t be up to the smokers to pay for it. This is the same whether they’re taxing cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate, or McDonald’s hamburgers.
If you want people to stop smoking than do they should do what they’re already doing: education.
What bothers about people like @TooBlue is that they’re way to quick to jump on the bandwagon when the government starts laying down laws like this. My fear is that it will start small and continue to grow. We become conditioned to it happening because it sounds like a good thing at the time and the next thing you know you have a national ID card, it’s a law to have a non-slip bathmat (with regular inspections of your home), and you can only buy soy-turkey burgers at the supermarket.
@mrentropy I’ll admit, I didn’t see that point much. I was seeing along the lines that, as you say, exhaust from cars and shit are just as bad as a disgusting habit, really.
But I see your point, and said point has often been proven by towns that go dry and then create booze smuggling. The same would happen with cigarettes anyway, and it already does, unfortunately, occur with drugs.
Anyways that’s if I got this right.
The state is misusing it’s power to tax to manipulate citizen behavior.
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