I’m not a smoker but I was in a deli in NYC the other day and smokes were going for between $13.10 to $15.10 a pack. I don’t know what carton prices are.
When I was a little kid my aunt was a heavy smoker. She bought her cigs from a vending machine. The cost was 33 cents a pack. How does that work for a vending machine? The buyer had to insert 35 cents in the machine and each pack was packed with two shiny pennies. She threw them in a bowl and when I visited her she would give me the pennies.
Past the edit time:
If you extract that out to today’s top price in NYC it’s like she was giving me $2.64 for each pack she bought.
You want “used” cigarettes?
When I was in Indonesia years ago, there were men with pairs of giant tweezers scouring the streets for cigarette butts. At the end of the day, they brought the butts home and emptied the small amounts of tobacco on a table. Then they rolled cigarettes with this “used” tobacco and went out and sold them the next day.
I can’t imagine how concentrated the tar, nicotine and other goodies were in these cigarettes.
When I quit in November of 1998, single packs of Marlboro in Nebraska were $2.50, cartons about $21.00. I see them in the grocery store checkout line now for about $5.00 a pack and $48.00 a carton.
When I started smoking back in grade school, single packs were 32 cents.
They wouldn’t have to do any of that. Let’s look at the example you gave. A carton for $70 which is $7/pack.
I go buy a pack for $7 and sit around at a bus stop in a poor part of town and sell individual cigarettes at $1. When I sell the entire pack, I’ve profited $13. Do that a few times a day and it’s bad for a days work, especially considering no taxes are being taken from it.
Furthermore, there’s the social/economic stuff, the person spending all day selling cigarettes may very well have another source of income, either a real job, unemployment or disability. Also, they probably ‘accept’ food stamps in that, they’ll sell someone a $7 pack of cigarettes for, say $10 or $15 worth of EBT eligible stuff that the ‘customer’ can run into the gas station and buy.
TLDR, they don’t have to steal them or go get them from somewhere else, they don’t sell them for less than what they’re worth (or even the same), they’re selling them at a markup, to people that either don’t want or can’t afford an entire pack.
Contrary to what some politicians seem to think, you can only raise taxes so high before market participants (both sellers and buyers) resort to smuggling and black markets. It’s really not that far to VA, where cigs cost under $5 a pack. Load up a truck and drive to NYC and you can make some real money. Heck, even going across state lines to NJ, PA and other states can save money pretty fast.
Heck, I know smokers here in PA who drive down to VA or WV to load up on smokes to save a couple dollars a pack. While I don’t smoke, and hate cigarettes, I find obscene tax rates to be immoral as well.
People should take a hint and quit smoking. Not only your health improves greatly but put the tobacco monopoly out of business.
…and it’s NOT bad for a day’s work…
I used to think people selling black market cigarettes were crooks, but after seeing this I realized that they are unselfishly performing an important public service.
Cig taxes are sin taxes, intended to limit purchase by pricing the product out of a cheap/available tier. In most cases, the funds go to anti-smoking or smoking treatment efforts.
That does, IMVHO, put them in a different category from taxes wrung from irrelevant sources to fund politico’s limousines and pet district projects.