Good news on the health side. This Tuesday August 7, 2018, the General Directorate of Customs published official figures of the tobacco market for mainland France, i.e. the volume of deliveries to tobacconists for this month of July 2018.
And the figures speak for themselves since they show a decrease in sales of 2.4% compared to July 2018; in total, since January 1, 2018, sales have cumulatively fallen by 9.2% in metropolitan France.
A drop in sales which can be explained (in part) by the increase in the price of tobacco: in 2017, the average price of a packet of cigarettes fell to 7.10 euros; in March 2018, it reached 8 euros.
Smoking, a scourge doomed to disappear?
For 2019, the government plans a first increase of 50 cents in April, then a second increase of 50 cents in November – thus, at the end of 2019, the packet of cigarettes should be around 9 euros. The milestone for a packet of cigarettes at 10 euros should, for its part, be reached in 2020.
“A packet (of cigarettes) at 15 euros is quite possible” reacted Yves Martinet, president of the National Committee against smoking.
It must be said that cigarettes are less and less attractive to the French: according to a survey published in May 2018 by Public Health France, they were “only” 12.2 million to smoke regularly in 2017, against 13.2 million in 2016, or 1 million fewer regular smokers in just one year. Efforts to continue!
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