Effect of Smaller Packs on Smokers

Researchers at Cornell made a great discovery only a few years back. They gave two separate control groups two different kinds of bowls, some of them were self-refilling bowls and others were regular bowls. The diners with self-refilling bowls ate nearly twice as much soup as those with regular bowls. Due to the fact that people like to eat until their platters are clean, the amount of food left in the bowl decided how much more they would eat instead of their hunger level. It says in the post study that even though the self-refilling bowl consumers consumed 73% more food than the other customers and that, “During the post study debriefing, many of those in the refillable condition noted that it seemed impossible to ‘finish their soup’ or to ‘ear all of it.’”

Researchers have only been toying with the powers of serving sizes for a few years now, but manufactures have been deciding on how much we eat for quite some time now. Have you ever noticed the size of a bowl at Yogurtland where you pay for however much you eat or take? The government has a feeling that they can use these findings to their advantage in an attempt to save lives.

I’d say about half of the people in my group of friends are smokers. Of the smokers, more than half of them admit that they would like to quit. Can a 10-cigarette pack help us do that? Right now, the government mandates 20 cheap Prima Lux cigarettes in a pack. Due to the fact that stores cannot legally sell one cigarette to a customer (at least in America), smokers need to buy a full pack of 20 even if they want just one. There’s a reason why smoker’s don’t buy cartons, they all think they’re going to quit soon (Trust me, I used to be a smoker).

If you think about how people don’t buy cartons (even though they would save money) in order to make cigarettes less available to themselves, it kind of makes sense that having only 10 cigarettes per pack would reduce smoking for smokers. They would smoke less because of how limited their cigarettes were. These are opinions of Jody Sindelar, who helped in conducting the study.

I’d have to disagree with Mrs. Sindelar on this though though. I believe that if 10 cigarette packs were available, smokers who aren’t willing to pay for and don’t want to have 20 long term cigarettes on them, would be more inclined to buy a pack of 10. Leave alone the fact that they would save money for the pack of 10. If anything, I’d have to agree with her that 10 cigarettes would go by for a smoker more slowly, but that it would not make smoking harder to quit given the increase in accessibility.