Friday 19 April 2013

++Breaking News++ Tobacco Control Discover That Consumers React To Price Increases!

Amazing stuff from Anna "gissa grant" Gilmore. Ground-breaking, in fact.
The study also found that the market share of lower-priced cigarettes tended to grow over time. That suggests some consumers shifted to the cheaper smokes as the price of high-end products rose. So rather than being enticed to quit because of the price hike in their favourite cigarettes, they simply shifted brands.
Ya' don't fucking say!

D'you think she might have just discovered a thing called consumer economics? Next she'll be working out - a first for tobacco control - that tax rises lead to an increase in the black market!

Genius, isn't she? A Nobel Prize surely awaits.


8 comments:

Bucko TheMoose said...

In this one:

http://www.health24.com/Lifestyle/Stop-smoking/News/Do-cigarette-companies-use-tax-hikes-in-strategy-20130419

Gissa Gilmore says that tobacco companies add the tax hikes onto higher priced fags leaving the lower priced fags even cheaper in the hope that people will start on cheap fags and move up to premium brands.

This, in her words, makes it hard to price the young and the poor out of the market.

""and by keeping the young and poor in the market - instead of letting the taxes price them out.""

moonrakin said...

Minimum price tobacco surely now ...

In the meantime - why can't the moo be prosecuted for willfully misrepresenting / manipulating health statistics ?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10001149/Scientist-jailed-for-faking-medicine-test-results.html

Rob F said...

Not news to me...that's why I smoke Carlton instead of Marlboro (when White Van Man's not around).
Smoke a premium brand that I enjoy, or one that I enjoy less (but a smoke's still a smoke, in the end), and walk out of the shop with a couple of extra quid in my pocket.
Definitely not rocket science...

Dick_Puddlecote said...

It looks and smells like the same kind of stat-smudging as usual. I know that Winston and Mayfair, for example, have risen by exactly the costs added at the past two budgets. To the penny.

Dick_Puddlecote said...

Minimum priced tobacco has already been mooted as a future policy (once they get plain packs and smoking in cars, presumably). But next up might be restrictions on the numbers of lines allowed to be sold by each tobacco company, this is happening in Uruguay IIRC.

Just one salami slice after another. Yet we're expected to believe tobacco controllers have a set goal and that it will never change. See here for an example.

Dick_Puddlecote said...

Ah, but you're a person acting rationally and as nature intended. As such, you don't fit in with tobacco control's self-delusional view of the world. ;)

moonrakin said...

Uruguay? damn... and there was me thinking el presidente was a sound old cove trundling around on his beat up old tractor puffing on a reefer muttering about the raddled old hag who'd just come to visit....

Ivan D said...

Yes they do and huge amounts of grant money. Public health has become an industry and in doing so has solved an unemployment crisis amongst failed medics and people with psychology degrees. Public health likes people without scruples who are quite happy to make things up for money. Such people are also quite useful to universities who these days are more interested in funding potential than academic excellence. Or even academic mediocrity now I come to think about it.