When I started, cigs were $3.50 per pack. But that wasn't all too many years ago.
I never thought I'd see the day when I'd defend big tobacco, but most of the increases in the past few years have been additional taxes.
The feds get $1.01 per pack
NY State charges $2.75
NY City charges $1.50
Then they have the nerve to charge sales tax on it all, including taxing the other taxes. In NYC that's 8.375% so I paid $0.44 per pack in sales tax on the above excise taxes (plus sales tax on what BT charged.) By the time you add everything up, close to 2/3 of the money I paid for each pack went directly to some government agency.
Quite a ways from the "less than $10 a carton" I paid in the early 70s.
25 cents a pack from a machine. Gas was like 23 cents a gallon. Saturday morning cartoons were good also had Fury, My Friend Flicka, Sky King, and Roy Rogers. Yep, color me old. LOL
Yes, I also remember smoking in the service - Smoke em if you gottem - I also remember having to field strip them when we were through...
Thats what got me as well...in HS chewing was the norm for guys, never really smoked much until I joined the Navy in 89. Then smokes were less than $10 a carton in the Exchange and smokers got to run off to the 'special room' that was in every building and light up while those that didn't had to do some form of busywork or wait for us to come back. They were always very accommodating to smokers, it was advantageous to be one back then. When on deployments overseas, they had whats called the Sea Store where cartons of cigs were often 1/2 to 1/4 the cost from back in the states so we would load up and sell them back home.
Being on submarines and a smoker was not an easy thing either, there were times that the atmosphere control equipment would break down or some other problem that the "smoking lamp" would be out meaning no smoking onboard and half the crew smoked. Talk about a grumpy group of people. One deployment I made, we went under the polar ice cap for a few months and this once happened for over a week straight. People were literally freaking out, fighting, sneaking smokes hoping not to get caught, removing the tobacco from a cig to turn it into chew...8-o