CancerWatch Chair and Founder, Jill Clark, on the campaign to stop supermarket sales of tobacco.
Next time you put your weekly shopping through the tills at your local supermarket, how many of the items on it are priced as high as £18, or indeed any price remotely close to it?
A packet of six tomatoes typically comes in at about 99p. Even a microwaveable luxury fish pie comes in at only £7.99. £18 is way out of step with the vast majority of grocery goods forming the bulk of supermarket sales, yet this is the typical price of a packet of 20 cigarettes being sold in a supermarket. However, this £18 yields very little profit for the supermarkets, as up to 80% of the price is typically tax levied by the government.
Supermarkets and tobacco: The quiet bedfellows
High street supermarkets put a premium on keeping prices down and rarely stock highly priced individual items, so it is very difficult to see why so many supermarkets are still selling tobacco. In practice, some supermarket chains have given up on selling tobacco products, which proves that this trade is not a necessary part of a thriving grocery business. Yet, the larger supermarkets continue to stock cigarettes and, as one of the most popular outlets for cigarette purchases, are probably responsible for a large share of the tobacco products consumed in this country today.
Bearing in mind that supermarkets have been mandated by the Government to deliver a health agenda, and that healthy eating and healthy lifestyles have become central to their corporate identities and stated values, tobacco products seem an incongruous line of stock for supermarkets to hold.
I don’t need to remind you of the litany of detrimental effects of cigarettes on the nation’s health – 15 different types of cancer (not just lung cancer), strokes, heart attacks, not to mention still births and house fires. Tobacco products are also believed to account for 50% of all health inequalities in the UK.
Yet a number of supermarkets continue to sell these products, and activists, including health campaigners and poverty campaigners continue to turn a blind eye. Or perhaps they don’t have an eye at all, for under government regulations shops are not allowed to openly display cigarettes on their shelves, so people may be just less aware that these high-street supermarkets are selling such pernicious products.
Taking a stand at supermarket AGMs
Here at CancerWatch, we take a stand on this, and I as chairman use a personal holding of shares in the large supermarket chains to attend their Annual General Meetings and to address the chairman and board of directors and remonstrate with them about their sales of tobacco products. It is a lonely business; corporate AGMs which are open to individual shareholders are archaic meetings, where the main events are elderly gentlemen with pocket-sized shareholdings complaining about obscure accountancy procedures.
Environmental campaigners have been remarkably successful in using this platform to change the policies of the major supermarkets, to the extent that they now have little left to raise, which leaves more time in the AGM for everyone else and gives one hope that one’s interventions are going to have an effect. It is also gratifying that in speaking out, I have received huge support from the other shareholders for my stand against tobacco; there really is no support for the selling of cigarettes from the shareholders.
Time to speak out
It is a remarkable fact that ethical fund managers, local government pension trustees, campaigning organisations and others who object strongly to the corporate manufacturers of cigarettes, or having their pensions invested in such companies, seem to have no concerns about the supermarkets who are among the biggest distributors of tobacco. Not only do they not speak out, but they don’t seem to notice what is happening.
In the Netherlands, it is illegal for supermarkets to sell tobacco products; they can only be sold via specialist shops. At CancerWatch we believe the same should hold in the UK and that high street supermarkets should be held to higher standards, and we will continue to campaign on this issue until we attain our objective.