What Women Want by Paco Underhill

Author:Paco Underhill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-03-13T05:00:00+00:00

SIN #3: SMOKE GETS IN HER EYES

As I mentioned earlier, the topic of cigarettes and women is in part linked to weight loss. Advertisers have noted this. The female-targeted cigarette tends to be long, thin, and tubular—a blinding-white magic wand capable of curbing appetite and banishing fat molecules. There is no irony that the female of the species typically smokes the 100-millimeter models. A close female friend of mine who doesn’t smoke very often always buys Nat Sherman Fantasias when she does. They are 101 millimeters long, skinny, and come in a series of pastel colors. Some of the major, and most nefarious, innovations in the tobacco industry have had to do with targeting the female smoker who’s on the fence about her own shape and curves. I don’t know any woman who smokes Camel Wides, or for that matter, any other thick, stumpy cigarette. As a brand, Virginia Slims has less to do with Thomas Jefferson and Monticello than it does with attaining an ideal goal, thinness, along the way distracting the female from a slew of fatal health issues.

Smoking a “lite” cigarette is all about becoming a female so airy and pixie-ish she can almost levitate.

Among the many challenges the tobacco industry faces is that as cigarette taxes have increased, fewer cartons get bought. The number of places where a consumer can buy cigarettes has declined, as well, leaving the convenience store as home base to purchase your coffin nails. The second most popular cigarette-distribution centers are drugstores. This has prompted a lot of debate within that industry. Should a place that’s ostensibly focused on keeping consumers healthy even be carrying cigarettes? If not, what could replace them that’s equally profitable? As a partial solution to this problem, big drugstore chains like Walgreens now sell cigarettes and smoking cessation products such as Nicorette and the patch right next to one another.

An additional point about drugstore and C-store markets: their sales of tobacco are geared heavily to the communities they serve. In high-end neighborhoods, cigarette sales are minimal. The denizens of these hamlets have for all intents and purposes kicked the habit. In more blue-collar communities, the number of people who smoke is much higher. Yes, everyone knows by now what cigarettes do to you. But if your financial resources are limited, smoking more than ever becomes a small source of relaxation and, despite the ever-rising prices of cigarettes, a relatively inexpensive form of self-indulgence. In a higher-end community, you could perhaps relieve that same impulse by buying a new blouse or taking a joyride in your convertible BMW. Smoking is all about punctuating time—adding commas, periods, and semicolons to the hours of your day. For many other people, it’s also about taking a well-deserved break.

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