Re: no big loss. I never did like Shake ‘n Bake much.

Fudge replies:

Miracle Whip, Shake n’ Bake, Jell-O, Maxwell House, Kraft Dinner, Kool-Aid,
Raisin Brand, Miller Beer…Why are people buying tobacco from a food
company?

All are really popular products, most are actually not that bad (try adding
hot-dogs to the kraft, breaks up the taste). Why boycott these products?
Tobacco revenues are falling yearly and the lawsuits are mounting. Fairly
soon most of these companies will likely give up on the tobacco side of
their business and focus more on other things. Maybe if people spent some of
their tobacco cash on jell-o it would be a good thing no matter who makes
it. Let them make all the cigarettes they want, if no one is smoking them it
won’t last very long anyway! Some places are currently asking for
legislation that limits where people can smoke outside! If the price of
pants goes up to $300 and when I buy them I’m told that I can’t wear them in
restaurants or downtown, and when I do wear them people stare at me and
shake their heads, and they make my breath smell, and they have this picture
on the side of some guy who wore pants all his life and his legs are all
white and pasty…pretty soon I say “Fuck pants!”, gimme some of them shorts!

Who the hell reads Harper’s anyways?

As to your pants parable, in theory you may be correct. Unfortunately, in reality most people are not as wise as you are – many do continue to smoke, likely due to the fact that, unlike wearing pants, smoking is rather addictive whereas pant-wearing is merely a matter of style and comfort.

Cigarette companies advertise, they do not simply produce a product. They advertise to “young people,” a demographic which has not abandoned smoking as readily as others. I would prefer if the money I spent on groceries did not end up financing an ad campaign for a product which kills approximately 1200 people a day in the US alone.

If I might make an analogy of my own, let me cast tobacco companies as a criminal, a mass-murderer. If said murderer becomes more inept and bumbling with age, unable to knock off people in the record numbers it has previously (7.2 million in the last 20 years), I still don’t think I’m going to buy Popsicle-stick sculptures from the guy because his profits (431 billion in the last 20 years) are diminishing somewhat, no matter how attractive his art might be.