A Bike To Take Your Breath Away

This is the story of a $1,984.40 bicycle and who pays for it.

The bike in question, a Fuji folding mountain bike, actually retails for about $350 - or would if you could buy it in a bicycle shop.

But this bike is made exclusively for a promotional scheme run by Marlboro cigarettes, so its costs can be computed several different ways.

Let’s start with the New Math of advertising.

First, you take the $5.9 billion in operating profits derived in 1994 from the sale of tobacco products by Philip Morris, makers of Marlboro, the world’s top-selling brand.

Then you subtract the profits lost when 3,000 people quit smoking each day and stop financing their pack-a-day addiction. Pretty soon, it adds up to sales going down.

So you follow the latest trend and launch a campaign to reward Marlboro smokers with goodies.

“It’s called ‘lifestyle advertising,’ and it’s aimed at creating a culture and sense of community around a product,” explains Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School of Communications.

“It’s called ‘trinkets and trash,’ and it’s one of the big issues in respect to marketing cigarettes to kids,” says William Novelli, director of the Coordinating Committee to Prevent Tobacco Use by Youth.

Whatever it’s called, experts say that redemption campaigns have been on the increase. In 1993, tobacco companies spent $756 million on specialty items; the year before, they spent $340 million.

“Kids love this stuff - the T-shirts, backpacks, bikes and things,” says Novelli. “It’s no accident these promotions are linked to heavily advertised brands, just as it’s no accident that 85 percent of young people who smoke smoke the three most heavily advertised brands.”

Certainly, more kids do smoke.

The University of Michigan Survey Research Center’s annual survey of high school students has shown that, over the past four years, smoking has been on the increase and peer disapproval of cigarettes has been on the wane. The proportion of students who view smoking as dangerous has been declining since 1993.

The current Marlboro campaign is the third major promotion of its kind since 1993. All three have featured merchandise that can be redeemed only by purchasing Marlboros.

Which brings us to a Real Math calculation of the cost of a Marlboro bike.

According to the Marlboro catalog, the bike costs $110 in cash plus 2,200 miles of travel in Marlboro Country. The only way to accumulate miles is to collect the product code symbols printed on Marlboro packages. Each pack counts for five miles, so you would need 440 packs to earn the right to buy the mountain bike.

In Pennsylvania, a pack of Marlboros costs $2.20, so would-be bikers have to purchase $968 worth of cigarettes to qualify for their prize. Add the $110 price, and the cost of pedaling off-road just went up to $1,078.

But that doesn’t factor in the cost of Health Math.

According to a study by epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each pack of cigarettes consumed by American smokers generates $2.06 in direct expenditures for medical care.

The study considered only the cost of health care for smokers and did not take into account lost productivity, income and revenues resulting from smoking-related illnesses and premature deaths. But even then, it cost almost as much per pack to treat smokers as it did to buy the cigarettes to begin with.

High insurance premiums help foot the bill, but 43 percent of the cost is ponied up by taxpayers through public funding of Medicare and Medicaid.

Regardless of who pays, the additional medical costs - 440 packs at $2.06 per pack - run the total price of the bike up to $1,984.40.

In the strange, self-condemning logic of the pro-smoking lobby, those costs are offset by the fact that smokers obligingly die off early and save society the cost of pensions, Social Security and more costly lingering diseases.

Maybe so, but that’s still a stiff price to pay for a bicycle.

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