$14 in New York City. If that isn't incentive to quit I don't know what could be.
I quit after my right lung collapsed while jogging back in 1973. Flirted with it off and on, mostly off, a few years after that.
Grateful to be a non-smoker. Damn, who could possibly afford $14 a pack?
Apparently quite a few people still can; unless they're traveling out of state to buy them, or rolling their own. At those prices it might just make sense for someone to drive to WV, fill the trunk and back seat with cartons of cigarettes - tastefully reboxed as something else, just in case the NYPD nannies get nosy - and drive back. If the going price in WV is $5/pack, that makes a $9/pack differential. NYC to Martinsburg, WV is about 270 miles each way, so assume 560 miles total round trip. If we took my car, a '99 Mercury Grand Marquis that gets about 25mpg at 60-65mph, that works out to 23 gallons (rounded up) for the round trip. The current price of a gallon of premium gas along I-81 in PA is approximately $3.80 right now (I get too many knocks if I don't run premium). That works out to fuel costs of $87.40 - round it to $90. However, there are tolls to be paid as well coming out of, and going back into, NYC along I-78 (we're taking I-81 to avoid the tolls, and traffic, on the NJ Turnpike). A quickie google indicates that tolls roundtrip will probably be about $20. Timewise, the drive itself will take about 5 hours each way, and buying the smokes and loading the car is likely to take about 2 hours (I'm guessing here), for a total time commitment of about 12 hours - tiring, but I've done worse before - so we'll assume that we don't stay overnight anywhere on the road. We will have to eat, though, and get drinks and noshes for the ride. For one person, I'm going to guess that we're looking at two meals (that's what I've usually done on long trips like that), plus at least 3 or 4 big sodas and a large bag of doritos (ranch flavored, of course). All in, I'm going to budget $30 for meals and noshes round trip.
That brings our total estimated costs for a round trip to Martinsburg, WV for smokes - assuming we go with prevailing traffic and don't get any speeding tickets!!! - to be about $140, which I will again round up to $150 just to be conservative (and who knows, I might want to sneak in a third meal!). I'm going to leave out depreciation on the car as well as apportioned values for insurance and the like - those are sunk costs that I would have paid anyways and I'm really just interested in marginal costs here.
Which brings us to the whole point of the exercise: how many packs of cigarettes would we have to buy to make the trip worthwhile? Since we're smokers I'm going to assume that we smoke two packs of cigarettes on the drive (that's probably what I would have smoked back in the day), so those two have to be factored in. Well, the price differential is $9 per pack, and $150 / $9 = 16.67, which rounds to 17; adding in those two we smoked on the trip means that - assuming we don't mind the ride - we would have to buy 19 packs of cigarettes in Martinsburg to make the trip just break even. That's right, it's less expensive to drive to Martinsburg, WV from NYC to buy two cartons of cigarettes - 20 measly packs - than it is to just buy them in NYC. A banker's box should be able to hold 10 cartons of cigarettes, and my car can hold about 22 banker's boxes in the trunk and back seat combined. So, we could fit about 220 cartons, or about 2,200 packs, of cigarettes in my car. If we take out 2 cartons - 20 packs - of cigarettes to cover the costs incurred, that leaves us with about 2,180 packs' worth of pure profit at $9/pack, for a total profit of about $19,620. That's not bad for a day's work mostly spent driving on the interstate, listening to the radio and smoking as you please.
Of course, that sort of profit is unrealistic unless one wants to get into the smuggling racket because unloading that many packs of cigarettes at $14/pack will be difficult, particularly since they don't carry the NYS tax stamps. Still, if we take a 50% haircut on account of the difficulties and risks of selling cigarettes without NYS tax stamps, we still have a net profit of about $9,800 - still not too bad for a day's work.
Organized crime has figured this out as well. Here's a story from 2012 about VA's concerns with increased cigarette smuggling:
Virginia crime panel examining cigarette trafficking
By Larry O'Dell
The Associated Press
© September 5, 2012
RICHMOND
Cigarette smuggling has become so lucrative that organized crime is getting involved, and many former drug dealers have switched to peddling contraband smokes instead of narcotics, the Virginia State Crime Commission was told Wednesday.
The General Assembly last winter directed the commission to study illegal cigarette trafficking and make recommendations before the 2013 legislative session, which begins in January. The commission's staff conducted the investigation and will present its recommendations at the next meeting in November.
G. Stewart Petoe, the commission's legal affairs director, said the amount of money cigarette smugglers can make is staggering. That's because they can buy a pack of premium cigarettes for about $5.55 in Virginia and sell it for a big profit on the black market in New York City, where a higher cigarette excise tax pushes the retail price to about $14 a pack.
Smuggle enough cigarettes and the payday can be enormous. Petoe said a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent estimated that a car can carry 10 cases of cigarettes — there are 60 cartons in a case — with an estimated profit of $34,000. Upgrade to a van, and 50 cases can turn a $170,000 profit. A large truckload can haul 800 cases and net a profit of $4 million.
Petoe said he was stunned by a Virginia State Police agent's observation that bootlegged cigarettes now have a higher profit margin than cocaine, heroin, marijuana or guns.
"It has just become irresistible for organized crime, and when they come to Virginia, they will bring ancillary violent crime with them," Petoe said.
He added that drug dealers are switching to smokes not only for the money, but also because they face less prison time if they're caught.
Petoe said cigarette smuggling is booming because many states, particularly those north of Virginia, have increased their cigarette excise taxes in recent years. Virginia — the nation's fifth-largest tobacco producer and home of its most prolific cigarette factory — has the country's second-lowest tax: $3 per carton. The tax is $43.50 in New York state and $58.50 in New York City.
According to Petoe, a recent study found that 30 percent of all cigarettes in New York City came from out of state — and of those, 71 percent were from Virginia.
"As the second-lowest tax state, we're setting ourselves up to be complicit," said state Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax, who added that she wasn't necessarily suggesting a tax increase.
Petoe said one of the simplest and fastest-growing methods of bootlegging is called "smurfing." Individual smugglers or small groups buy cartons of cigarettes at multiple locations throughout the day, then haul them out of state for resale on the black market.
Commission staff members conducting the study hung out for a while at a convenience store off Interstate 95 in the Richmond area, Petoe said, and watched one customer get out of a car and buy five cartons of cigarettes and return to the vehicle. Then another person got out of the car and did the same thing.
"It's very clear what they were doing," Petoe said.
Some cigarette traffickers seeking to maximize their illicit gains have established bogus retail operations so they can buy in bulk from wholesalers, Petoe said. He added that there are myriad other schemes involving forged tax stamps, selling cigarettes "off the books" to evade taxes, international smuggling and importing counterfeit cigarettes.
"The ingenuity of criminals is flabbergasting," Petoe said.
The commission also began examining whether the state needs to improve the process for gathering forensic evidence from sexual assault victims who are incapable of giving consent for the testing, but no recommendations were made.
here's my favorite takeaway from the article:
Petoe said he was stunned by a Virginia State Police agent's observation that bootlegged cigarettes now have a higher profit margin than cocaine, heroin, marijuana or guns.
Pretty amazing, isn't it. The Nanny fascists in NY have basically created a welfare-for-mobsters with their insane taxes.
