I no longer smoke, but I used to, and I am slightly fascinated by the price of cigarettes, and what it says about a society.
I lived in the Republic of Ireland until 1991. In the few years before I moved, a packet of cigarettes cost slightly under £2. (We used pounds back then!) That was about an hour's wage for a teenager (me!) at the time, so not cheap.
Way back then, way more people smoked than today. There were ashtrays everywhere. It was assumed that you could smoke everywhere. Presumably everything smelt faintly (or heavily) of cigarette smoke. When you woke up from a night out, your clothes would reek of cigarette smoke.
There were no cigarette ads on TV, those had been banned, but there were cigar ads. "Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet" ads were quite amusing. Also there were billboard ads, print ads, and cigarette companies sponsored Formula 1.
ANYWAY, it was common for bars in Ireland back then to have cigarette vending machines. It was not common to buy them from the barman - having packets of cigarettes behind the bar in piles was too much like having piles of cash. Vending machines encouraged honesty. These were often simple mechanical vending machines - you put in four fifty pence pieces (or, later, two pound coins) and the combined height of these unlocked a tray.
But here's the thing: people were extremely sensitive to the price of cigarettes in the south of Ireland back then. Extremely. Premium cigarettes might cost merely several pennies more than cheaper cigarettes. And if you went to a tobacconist (newsagent, petrol station) to buy them, they might cost merely £1.93. And everybody knew that e.g. a packet of twenty John Player Blue should cost £1.93. That was the price. So it was normal for the folks who ran the cigarette vending machines to tape 7p to the packet of cigarettes!!
This close attention to the price of cigarettes was a purely Republic of Ireland phenomenon, I'm told. It didn't exist in Northern Ireland, or the rest of the UK. Back then, this was before the "Celtic tiger", and Ireland was a poor country, with extremely high taxes. (In fact, every year in the budget, the minister of finance might increase the tax on beer and cigarettes, and the price of a pint and a packet of twenty would go up by precisely that amount. Plus whatever Guinness added to the price of a pint - they also put the price up slightly twice a year. Man, what a business franchise that was. Such pricing power!!!)
I moved to Northern Ireland I 1991 (to go to college), and it was so ... different. There was more money there at the time. The Troubles were still a thing, but I was 17, I didn't care. And cigarettes were much cheaper. Maybe as cheap as a pound (sterling).
But more than the price difference between the south and the north was the price variation in the the north. Nobody seemed to really care about the specific price of cigarettes - so vending machines instead of taking £2 and giving you back 7p would ... just ... charge ... £2 !!!!
And cheap cigarettes (e.g. Spar's own brand, "Sky", or Rothman's "Royals" ... which came in packs of 25!!!) were much cheaper than premium cigarettes (like Marlboro). I don't remember prices exactly, but cheap cigarettes could have twenty, thirty percent cheaper than premium cigarettes. This was so weird to me: that such price discrimination could exist.
It also became normal around this time to be able to buy cigarettes in packets of ten. Because they were expensive. Weirdly, in the south, it was never possible to buy Marlboro in packets of ten, but it was in the North. If you're used to packets of twenty, packets of ten look impossibly cute and weird. (But they fit a lot better into a denim jacket's breast pocket along with a lighter.)
Over time, the governments of both countries (Ireland, UK) gradually, steadily, inexorably ratcheted up the price of cigarettes. People still smoked, but fewer and fewer. And smoking became less socially acceptable. I gave up in the noughties at some point, as one does. But I kept a mild interest in the price of cigarettes.
When I moved to California in 2010, I was amazed at how cheap cigarettes were. Like, five dollars for a pack of twenty. And hardly anybody smoked!
Even today, in Massachusettes, a pack of twenty Marlboro costs about ten dollars! They're maybe the equivalent of $15-20 in the UK and Ireland (AFAIK, I haven't been there in a while).
The price of cigarettes definitely tells us something about a society. My vague hypothesis is that a society with a deathly poor underclass must have cheap cigarettes. And, conversely, a society with expensive cigarettes cannot have a deathly poor underclass.
California has an underclass; Massachusetts doesn't, not really.
Wouldn't it be funny if the price of cigarettes in a country was a better measure of inequality than the Gini coefficient? (Lower cigarette price meaning a more unequal society.)
I sometimes joke that a first world country is one where you can drink the water. But really, a better measure is that a first world country is a country with expensive cigarettes. The more expensive, the more first world.
