It’s plain to see pack confusion
It takes longer to sort goods that are deliberately packaged to all look alike, writes Matthew Drummond.
AUSTRALIA’S 18TH-RICHEST person, Lindsay Fox, and 23-yearold part-time 7-Eleven employee Sals Uppal share a problem – how to deal with the plain-packaged cigarettes that are now coming into shops and are nearly impossible to tell apart.
In Fox’s case, the problem is logistics – the large cardboard cartons that cigarettes are delivered in are not yet affected by the ban, but some tobacco companies are reducing the size and appearance of the branding as a precautionary step.
Which will cause problems if you, like Fox’s Linfox trucking company, are in the business of transporting cigarettes around the country.
It is understood that the added time and expense of dealing with cigarettes have caused Linfox to already seek to renegotiate its delivery contracts. A company spokesman declines to confirm or deny this, but says Linfox’s systems are being upgraded to electronic readers that will not rely on labels. Contracts ‘‘are regularly renegotiated’’, he said.
At the other end of the supply chain, Uppal estimates it now takes him five times longer to check off cigarette deliveries against invoices. It takes longer to locate brands on the shelves and then longer still if, as sometimes happens, a customer wants a packet with a less shocking image. The warning that smokers like the least, Uppal said, includes a small photo of a man named Bryan, aged 34, with a much larger photo showing him after 10 weeks in hospital ravaged with cancer.
‘‘The customers have been complaining and they don’t want a packet with this one,’’ he says holding up a packet with Bryan.
From this month cigarettes in Australia must be sold in identical brown packets, with brand names reduced to a small identical font and no graphics other than shocking images of diseased feet, eyeballs and lungs.
Since the start of October all cigarettes manufactured in Australia have had to comply with the new laws – which may be followed in New Zealand and perhaps Britain. Anti-tobacco groups are hoping that some stores will conclude selling cigarettes is not worth the hassle.
Fiona Sharkie, of the Victorian Cancer Council, said that when rules for selling tobacco have tightened, the number of sales outlets drops – by an estimated 5 per cent in Victoria when stores were last year made to cover cartons from public view.
There’s little chance of that occurring with major supermarket chains. Coles spokesman Jim Cooper said the new laws have necessitated some operational changes ‘‘but we’re working through these changes to be compliant with new legislation’’.
A spokesman for one tobacco company, who declined to be named, concedes some retailers were having a tough time figuring out how to arrange their cigarettes.
‘‘The other day I was in a shop, and my eyesight is not brilliant, but whereas I could spot a red- and-white packet of Marlboro, I had to really squint to pick them out in a drawer.
‘‘You could alphabetise them, but ideally you’d want to have your best sellers in the top at the middle. So people aren’t sure what they’re going to do.’’
But best sellers might change, said Jack Chang, a 42-year-old tobacconist whose store is in Melbourne’s CBD.
Laws dictating the appearance of the cigarettes themselves – no ‘‘ribbing’’ on the paper and a different look for the filter – means paper has changed.
‘‘They’re complaining that the taste has changed,’’ he said. He predicted smokers will switch brands until they find a cigarette that tastes like what they are used to.
‘‘People won’t stop smoking,’’ he said.