Newark, Ohio

Swisher Sweets

Back when I was a kid, back when smoking was still a common practice, Swisher Sweets were a popular brand of small cigars. When I was in high school the nearest sizable town was Newark, Ohio, which, it turns out, was the birthplace of these same Swisher Sweets. The company started there back in 1861. By 1895 they are making 300,000 cigars a day.

Jacksonville, Florida

In 1924 they packed up and moved to Jacksonville, Florida. All this comes from the company's web site.

Newark has shown up a couple other times here.

Via California Bob.

SMOKE! SMOKE! SMOKE! THAT CIGARETTE

A toe tapping romp through (mostly) vintage cigarette TV advertising with music by Asleep at the Wheel. Also featured is the earliest filmed ad for Admiral Cigarettes, an 1897 Edison film, and a Fred & Barney from the Flintstones smoking Winston Cigarettes.  

Inspired by Dustbury.
Previous posts about cigarettes.

Cigarettes & Liquor

Twister Liquor Store, Pampatar, Venezuela

At lunch today my friend Marc tells us about liquor pricing in Venezuela. He goes in a liquor store and as you might expect they have three sizes of liquor bottles: small, medium and large. Also, as you might expect, the small bottle is the cheapest, the large bottle is the most expensive and the medium size bottle falls somewhere in between. However, when he (or more likely his wife) checks the price per milliliter he is surprised to find that the small bottle is still the cheapest.

Now this is completely backwards to what we have come to expect in the US. The bigger bottle is supposed to be the "economy" size. By putting liquor in a larger bottle, the producer saves on packaging, and this cost savings is supposedly passed on to the consumer. There was even a bit of a scandal a few years ago when it was discovered that this was not necessarily the case. That is why you seen the price per ounce displayed with prices in grocery stores.

Marc asks the clerk about this, and given the language barrier and all it takes some doing, but eventually he finds out that she is aware of this discrepancy. Their logic down there is slightly different than here. Poor people can only afford to buy the small bottles, so they sell them as cheap as possible. People who have enough money ("rich people") to buy the larger bottles do not mind paying a little extra in order to get one big bottle instead of a bunch of small bottles. So they are paying for the convenience of having the big bottle. Weird.

And cigarettes? In Venezuela there is no such thing as a "carton of cigarettes" or even a pack. Cigarettes are sold individually. I have seen this in some convenience stores here a few years ago. Haven't seen it recently, but I haven't been in one either.

Update November 2016 repaired broken html

Cigarette Making Machines

High Speed Cigarette Making Machine

After I wrote my last post about this, I got to wondering if there were any machines available that could automatically produce a hundred cigarettes. What I found was a bunch of hand operated devices for making a one cigarette at a time. A little more searching turned up the behemoth in the picture. It weighs 4 tons and can produce 6,000 cigarettes per minute. Who in their right mind needs 6,000 cigarettes a minute? That is like eight million cigarettes a day! Okay, to keep all the smokers in the US supplied with a pack a day, you would need a couple hundred of these machines.

Cigarette Making Machine

Then I found this machine. It looks to be more like what you would need to be able to produce a carton of smokes for customers on a regular basis. I don't know how much the machine costs, so I don't know if you could make a business out of it, but with the exorbitant taxes on cigarettes, I imagine some people will start looking into it. I think the key is to offer a custom cigarette making service. Customer brings their tobacco to the roller who performs the service of putting the customer's tobacco into cigarettes. Selling ready made cigarettes is where the tax man gets you.

Yes, smoking is bad for your health, but some people are going to smoke anyway. Some people are hopelessly addicted, they couldn't quit if their life depended on it. Then there's all the chemicals and radioactive elements in commercial tobacco that you could avoid by getting your cigarettes custom made using organic tobacco.

Update November 2016 fixed bad html.

Business Opportunity: Custom Cigarettes

With the price of a pack of cigarettes now about $5, I am thinking rolling your own could be saving you some serious money. When I was in Canada some zillion years ago, all the smokers I ran into rolled their own, and not just bums either. I met a truck driver who had a baggie full of smokes. He and his wife would sit down every month or two and roll a thousand cigarettes and that would keep them supplied for a while. I imagine it might be worthwhile for a tobacco shop to roll cigarettes to order for quantities as small as 200. That's what's in a carton. Since most of the price of a pack of ready made smokes is tax, rolling your own, or having them rolled could easily save you a $1000 a year.

On top of that, if you could get organic tobacco, it might be healthier to boot. First of all you get rid of the chemicals that the cigarette companies put in the cigarettes (whatever they are). Second of all you get rid of the radioactive lead, which is probably the cause of lung cancer in smokers. Of course you still get to deal with emphysema, but you can't have everything.

Wrong Again

We had two big measures on the ballot Tuesday: Measures 49 & 50. Wednesday's headline in the Oregonian summed it up pretty well:

ELECTION 2007

MEASURE 49
Yes: 61.9% $4.8 million spent
No: 38.1% $2.3 million spent

MEASURE 50

Yes: 40.5% $3.4 million spent

No: 59.5% $11.8 million spent

Just goes to show that if you have enough money you can pretty much get what you want, and the Measure 49 proponents (I am not sure who they are) and the Measure 50 opponents (the cigarette companies) got what they wanted.

Measure 50 issue is a little more clear cut, so I will start there. Measure 50 would raise cigarette taxes. The extra revenue would go towards children's health care. The money spent campaigning against this measure came from the cigarette companies. I voted for it simply because the cigarette companies were against it. Also, raising cigarette taxes would increase the profit margins for people smuggling cigarettes from Idaho, and we always need more good paying jobs. But it looks like the cigarette companies were able to persuade people raising this tax was not a good idea.

I remember visiting Canada 30 odd years ago and everyone I ran into up there rolled their own cigarettes. One truck driver I met had a baggy with about 30 cigarettes in it. He told me he and his wife would sit down and roll a thousand or so and seal them up in baggies. He would have enough to last for weeks. I do not think I have ever run into an American who rolls his own. The point is I don't feel bad about raising taxes for smokers. If they weren't so lazy, they could roll their own and save $4 a pack. Plain tobacco is not expensive, only when it is rolled into cigarettes does it get taxed.

Measure 49 has something to do with land use laws. I voted against this one just because I do not like people clogging up the ballot with complicated measures that hold no interest for me. Oregon has a set of laws that are supposed to contain urban sprawl and preserve land for farming. A couple of years ago Measure 37 was passed that really upset the apple cart. Measure 49 was supposed to correct it. The whole thing does not make much sense to me. If it was really a case of the state taking away value from land, you would think the courts would have settled it a long time ago. And this business of preserving land for farming is a bunch of hooey. Would you like to know what the biggest agricultural crop in Oregon is? It is grass seed! Criminently, we are trying to contain urban sprawl so we can grow more grass seed for golf courses and lawns? Give me a break!

I do not like urban sprawl, but I would rather see us building compact cities that attracted people to live in them rather continuing on in our inept manner that causes people to move to the suburbs in search of affordable housing.

I saw one sign supporting Measure 49 that said Open Spaces or Urban Sprawl? Open spaces are an illusion, around these parts anyway. There are open fields around here, but they aren't really open, they belong to some farmer, and he has crops planted on it. So you can't just go wandering around in these fields. Of course, any kind of open land does not have houses on it, which means there are no people there, which means there are fewer cars on the road, but that is just a temporary condition. With more people, there are going to be more houses somewhere. Maybe not right here, maybe they will be farther out, which means people will be driving farther to work. I do not see a good end to this.

Update May 2022 reformatted headline.

Sales Tax

Oregon is one of the few states that does not have a sales tax, and I am perfectly fine with it. Periodically though, someone raises the issue that we should have a sales tax for one reason or another. Perhaps we should. But let me tell you what I think is the big problem with sales taxes: it is not that it raises the prices of goods, it is that the price you pay at the register is not the price marked on the item. In other words, the merchant has an item marked for sale for a dollar and you go to check out in a state with sales tax and they tell you they want a dollar and so many cents. This is stupid and annoying.

There are any number of other items that are taxed by the state and federal governments that do not suffer from this kind of annoying sticker shock. Things like gasoline, cigarettes and tobacco are all taxed, and the taxes never show up, they are practically invisible.

So if you are going to put in a sales tax, make it invisible. Make it a percentage of a store's gross receipts. Now I am sure there are some sharpies who are going to quibble about a tenth of a percentage point here or there. Don't let that bother you. We are not concerned about hundreds or thousands of dollars the accountants will shave their tax bills by, we are concerned about the millions of dollars of tax revenue we will receive.

And while you are making laws, make one that causes the total tax to be printed on each reciept, especially cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline. That would educate people.