I’m always surprised when I meet someone who still smokes. It’s a bit like meeting someone who makes their own jam. Except it kills you. The Federal Government is looking at introducing plain packaging legislation to remove one of the last ways tobacco companies can ‘advertise’ and market their brands – with their packaging. The idea is that if all cigarettes are sold in the same packaging, yet another marketing tool will be removed from cigarette companies and sales will go down. And lives will be saved. Imagine that.

‘Great idea!’ I thought. But you’ll be shocked to hear not everyone agrees. And THIS is where it gets interesting…..

The Sydney Morning Herald ‘s Lema Samandar reports:

Sheryle Moon, the spokesperson for The Alliance of Australian Retailers was interviewed on Lateline by Peter Lloyd. Here is part of the transcript:

Huh? I heard another interview with someone from The Alliance of Australian Retailers on ABC radio and he admitted that for service stations, cigarettes account for about 40% of store profits and 10-15% of total profits. No wonder they’re nervous.

He kept trying to say that what service stations and convenience stores sell is fast service and if it took an employee an extra 10-20 seconds to identify the brand requested from the customer, they might buy their cigarettes somewhere else (which made no sense given all retailers will be in same boat with plain packaging). A smoker rang in to argue that smoker’s were addicts and they’d wait however long it took to purchase their fix.

The spokesman also complained that no other country in the world had plain packaging for cigarettes and ‘why are we leading the world on this?”. I don’t think that’s a terribly convincing argument just quietly…

I have one other question – if tobacco companies are not allowed to advertise, how is it they can pay for the advertising of other groups who are spruiking their products?

Smoker? Non-smoker? Do you think plain packaging for cigarettes should become law?