Puffing cigarettes, cigars and pipes until the smoke taxed the air conditioning at Miami Beach's plush hotel Fontainebleau, the men who know tobacco best gathered this week to pay homage to the persistence of one of the world's most widespread habits. More than 11,000 strong, the delegates to the annual convention of the National Association of Tobacco Distributors—which sells 75% of all U.S. tobacco products—peered at exhibits that traced tobacco from field to lip, critically taste-tested piles of free cigarettes, jostled happily through luncheons, dinners, parties. But the greatest pleasure of all was just talking shop. Never had shoptalk been so cheery, for never had business been so good.
U.S. smokers are puffing cigarettes at a record rate. The nation now has 58 million smokers—58% of all men and 36% of all women over 15. Every second of every day, they buy some 15,000 cigarettes. Last year Americans spent $7 billion on tobacco, more than Canada's national budget, consumed a record 462.7 billion cigarettes, up 4.5% from record 1958. To supply them, the U.S. annually grows 1.8 billion lbs. of tobacco on 500,000 farms, makes it into cigars and cigarettes in 625 factories.
What these figures show is that the U.S. tobacco industry, which has undergone crisis after crisis, has not only recovered nicely from the cancer scare, but is turning the unsettling side effects of the debate to its own advantage. By flooding the market with filters that promised protection from tar and nicotine, tobaccomen turned the whole market topsy-turvy. In 1952 five brands, led by Reynolds Tobacco's Camel (and followed by American Tobacco's Lucky Strike, Liggett & Myers' Chesterfield, American's Pall Mall, and Philip Morris), held 82% of the cigarette market; today that share is held by ten brands, many of them born since then. Filters have swelled from i% of the market in 1952 to 50% today, and menthol cigarettes have gone from 3% to 10%. Nor is the race to novelty over. This week Brown & Williamson began test-marketing a new filtered cigarette called Kentucky Kings.
Kings' novel selling point: even the filter is made of tobacco.
New Wooing Trend? The U.S. tobacco industry, sensing a new shift in the public taste, is undergoing yet another upheaval.