Lobby groups up in smoke

The huge fight that Big Tobacco is putting up against the Government’s proposal to legislate for plain packaging for cigarettes is hardly surprising.

The idea of having your brands taken away would be enough to send any company running straight to lawyers and while the cigarette manufacturers would appear to have next to no chance of reversing the Government’s decision you can bet they will try everything to get compensation.

Big Tobacco fighting this fight is one thing but retail associations fighting on behalf of tobacco giants is another thing entirely.

Today the Alliance of Australian Retailers, a group backed by the Australian Newsagents Association, the National Independent Retail Association and the Service Station Association, with funding provided by big tobacco companies, released more research by Deloitte that purports to show that small retailers will be hit hard by plain packaging laws.

Central to the research is the idea that plain packaging will make it harder for the shopkeeper to locate the customer’s chosen brand of smokes, thereby making the “tobacco transaction” take longer and adding to queuing times for customers.

The research argues that will in turn push customers away from small shops to big supermarkets.

A survey conducted as part of the study showed that 34% of consumers could change where they shop as a result of the switch to plain packaging and the report argues that “this could result in lost sales of between $164 and $1882 per week for the small retailers”.

That’s a big range and one built around a fairly weak theory – that 30 seconds of extra searching for cigarettes could turn a third of smokers away from small stores towards supermarkets, where shop assistants will somehow not need extra time to find packets of cigarettes.

That’s not all that’s confusing about the campaign from the Alliance of Australian Retailers, with the central theme of its campaign that plain packaging won’t work – that is it won’t change smoker behaviour.

If that’s true the Alliance has nothing to worry about – cigarette sales shouldn’t change and retailers shouldn’t lose a cent.

The retail lobby groups are pushing on with this seemingly doomed campaign because without funding from Big Tobacco they would struggle to survive.

It’s time for those retail groups to bow out of this debate because the confused and frankly questionable ideas the campaign are built on are eroding the credibility of lobby groups and damaging their reputations with the public.

With so much else to worry about in Australia’s struggling retail sector this is one battle the retailers can leave to Big Tobacco.