Retailers get defensive about pop prices

I stopped the other day at a place to get myself something to eat – a hamburger and Coca Cola (I took a pass on the fries) – and wound up getting into something of a quarrel with the manager over the price.

There might have been fewer questions if all posted the pop tax data as clearly as this McDonald's franchise did. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

Admittedly, when I heard how much was being charged, I tried to question the cost. Which caused the manager to go into a long diatribe about how this “damned tax” on pop and other sweetened beverages was causing him to jack up his own prices.

ACTUALLY, I WAS curious about the cost of the burger, and it took me a couple of minutes before I was able to cut off the manager and inform him I wasn’t questioning the cost of the soft drink.

He eventually gave me the straight answer about the burger price, and it seems the high price of the bill was due to the hamburger. Which means that, from my perspective, I now know of a place I won’t try to eat at again.

It was expensive, a bit too much for just a burger and Coke!

But what caught my attention about the incident was the quickness of the fast-food franchise manager to come to the aid of his cashier and engage in such a quarrel. I sense that many people are complaining about pop prices and are haranguing the hired help about the tab (and no, I don’t mean the soft drink Tab, which I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw it for sale anywhere).

ARE RESTAURANTEURS GETTING that touchy that they feel the need to defend themselves against complaining customers, many of whom admittedly are just cheapskates who likely will look for any excuse to complain about the price? Which is how I perceive the We Ask America survey showing 85.94 percent of people wanting the tax repealed, and 77.59 percent less likely to vote for county board President Toni Preckwinkle's re-election.

It is with incidents such as this in mind that I am not surprised to learn that the Can the Tax Coalition is going around citing statistics saying that beverage sales are on the decline by 47 percent in Cook County.

I’m sure the coalition, which gets its money from the American Beverage Association and other support from the Illinois Food Retailers Association, wants us to believe that this is a matter of people making special trips to surrounding counties or out-of-state (if they live near the Illinois/Indiana border) to buy their pop.

Some of it may be.

BUT I ALSO wonder if some of it a matter of people deciding that with the potentially significant boost in price due to the penny per ounce tax on such beverages, perhaps there just isn’t as much of a need to consume so much carbonation.

Which would mean that the county tax may be serving one of its stated goals – to help boost the public health by reducing the level of sugar that people consume. Although I’ll be the first to admit that the purpose of any tax is to raise revenue – and not to reduce consumption of anything.

Not even the taxes that get assessed on tobacco products that can make the price of a package of cigarettes so absurdly high that it’s a wonder anybody bothers to smoke.

But they still do!

NOW I DON’T know for sure how much of this so-called decline in pop sales is due to people just drinking less pop. It may be wishful thinking on my part. I’m also sure that some people will start thinking of their consumption of carbonation as something resembling a revolutionary statement.

Which is sad, if that’s really the biggest issue they have to get so worked up over.

My point here is to say I’m skeptical about this latest statistic, which the pop industry lobbyists touted on Wednesday as part of their effort in coming weeks leading up to the Cook County Board’s finance committee reviewing a measure to repeal the tax.

We’re going to get a lot of rhetoric from all sides of this equation from people who claim they’re looking out for our personal freedoms, but only care about them so long as they match up with their own financial interests!

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EXTRA: Life in government goes on

Election Day is past, yet I couldn’t help but get my chuckle from a television spot I saw air Thursday afternoon that desperately urges me to tell my Cook County Board member to vote against the sweetened beverages tax hike.
 

PRECKWINKLE: She passed the pop tax hike

That’s the one that will raise, by a penny per ounce, the tax charged on carbonated drinks like pop, along with fruit juices and other sweet drinks. All to try to raise some $174.3 million to plug a hole in the county government budget next year

I DON’T DOUBT the earnestness of those who put the spot together, claiming we’re already paying too much for everything in life, and that government ought to – in the favorite cliché of anti-taxers – “live within its means.”

But it was funny because by the time the spot aired, the issue was long over.

The county board heard debate on the issue Thursday morning, putting up with some 80 people who felt the need to express themselves on the calamitous issue of more-expensive pop. Then, they voted to a tie.

Which means that county board President Toni Preckwinkle herself got to break the tie, in her favor of course. Or, as it could also be viewed, she had to put her own neck on the line and publicly take a stance.

I’M SURE SHE would have preferred to have the county board members do the dirty work of passing this. Instead, it’s now on her record. She’s a tax-hiker!

Although her timing, if she had to do this, is good. So many people are p-o’ed about the concept of “President” Donald Trump that Preckwinkle’s actions may well slip past the public consciousness.

I don’t doubt some people will be upset about the cost of their pop can or two-liter bottle going up. A part of me doesn’t blame them.

 

SCHOCK: Tried to keep low profile in recent months

But we should also realize we no longer have nickel pop bottles of glass, with a refund if you return the bottle unshattered. Things invariably cost more. Even our pop, which if truth must be told we’d probably be better off if we drank less of it.

AND THIS IS coming from a man who believes seriously in the merits of a Coca-Cola every now and then!

The price of pop wasn’t the only issue of concern that came up on Thursday. For Aaron Schock, the one-time boy wonder who was supposed to be on the path to being the next Republican governor of Illinois, has learned a federal grand jury has hit him with 24 criminal charges – numerous counts for using campaign funds to pay for things such as cars, interior decorating of his office and a charter flight for he and friends to see the Chicago Bears play.

Schock has tried to keep a low-profile since resigning from Congress last year. But now, he’s likely to crop up more and more as we figure out if the guy who got himself elected to the Illinois Legislature in his early 20s and worked his way up the political ladder is now going to wind up getting an “Oxford education” – a stint at the minimum-security federal pen in Oxford, Wis.

Or maybe the outrage against Schock, who probably was a bit too flamboyant to “play in Peoria” as he tried to do, will also get drowned out by those who want to commit unmentionable acts upon Trump’s physical being?

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When will pop become verboten?

I can remember the day when those “The Real Cost” television spots that portray cigarette smoking as a disgusting, vile and all-around grotesque habit would have been considered downright subversive.

Satchel avoided fried foods, should he lose the pop bottle?

It is the changing attitude of our society that those who smoke are now looked upon as weak-willed and spineless – otherwise they’d have no problem quitting something that is going to wind up rotting away their lungs.

NOW IN MY case, that is one habit I never managed to acquire. Something about the smell just always turned me off.

But I am a person who enjoys the occasional Coca-Cola. Or a 7-Up or Dr. Pepper from time to time.

I always suspected that too much in the way of carbonated beverages probably wasn’t good for one’s health. Then again, too much of any one thing isn’t good. Balance, and moderation, are the keys to truly taking care of oneself.

But I now wonder how long it will be before those vintage television spots of young people singing how they’d “like to buy the world a Coke” will seem as ridiculous and absurd as those old cigarette ads that purported to have medical doctors endorsing specific tobacco products.

THINK I’M KIDDING? My thought is reinforced by the fact that the people at City Hall are contemplating a penny-per-ounce tax hike on syrups and powders, along with canned and bottled drinks.

It used to be thought of as healthy and refreshing

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the Illinois Restaurant Association is planning a lobbying effort against the tax hike – pointing out there already are two other taxes that apply to soft drinks.

Those include a 9 percent fountain drink tax on syrup and a 3 percent tax on cans and bottles.

The restaurant association contends that bolstering the cost of that 2-liter bottle of pop or can of Coke will wind up hurting sales to the point that people will wind up losing their jobs. Raising this tax to bolster municipal revenues will wind up doing greater harm to the economy – or so the association says.

The future of pop advertising?

WHICH STRIKES ME as being similar to the arguments that get made whenever a government entity decides it needs to raise money by raising the taxes on tobacco products – which already make the cost of buying a pack of cigarettes much higher in Chicago than anywhere else!

We hear how it is defeatist because raising the price of cigarettes will make them too expensive, and wind up backfiring against the level of revenue that is expected to be raised.

We also hear how we’d be doing society a greater favor by discouraging some people from smoking in the first place. Are we going to start hearing talk about how we’re bolstering the health of Chicagoans by making them want to drink something other than pop?

How long will it be before some people start claiming it is some sort of Constitutionally-protected Freedom of Expression (as in the First Amendment) to drink Coca-Cola without being told how bad it is for them?

OR IN THE case of some deluded people, their Pepsi Cola (which was just always too sweet for my own taste).

I realize the level of sugar that goes into a serving of pop can be fattening. Although I think the key to dealing with it is more exercise. Or perhaps more doses of ice-chilled water – which I’ll admit to personally enjoying just because I always feel like it helps to clean out my insides.

How long will it be before some advocacy group takes up the cause of carbonated beverages, depicting their drinkers as being some sort of rotting-away bumpkins who guzzle down too much “sodee?”

Or maybe they’ll dig one-time Pittsburgh Steeler “Mean Joe” Greene out of retirement to make a commercial where he denounces that day where he ever took that kid’s bottle of Coke?

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State budget issues likely to linger, but pop and cupcakes get addressed now

The best I can tell as of now, the Illinois General Assembly is going to approve a financial concoction for a state budget that will require them to come back later (perhaps during the fall veto session) to take actions that will prevent the state from developing long-term difficulties.

Pay off the Legislature in cupcakes

The bottom line is that our state officials are too preoccupied with Election Day factors to want to take a firm stance now. They want to put off until tomorrow what they should have addressed years ago.

NOW HAVING FOLLOWED the activity of state government for just over two full decades, I’m used to the concept of the Legislature thinking it can postpone problems until it is more comfortable dealing with them.

Which is why I find it comical to see what issues do become priorities for the General Assembly to deal with.

It literally came down to pop and cupcakes earlier this week. Both came before the Legislature, although the issue of carbonated soft drinks is one that will continue to come before the Springpatch set in future years.

These are the issues that the legislators are comfortable dealing with, while pushing off the complicated stuff that is going to get them negative attention no matter how they vote.

ALTHOUGH I SUSPECT that even doing nothing will get them a negative blast.

But back to cupcakes and pop. The state Senate addressed the former issue, while the Illinois House of Representatives became involved with an overly complex handling of the latter.

Art? Or new source of income from taxes?

 

The whole cupcake issue was motivated by a kid in the Illinois-based suburbs of St. Louis whose attempt to sell cupcakes got shut down by county health authorities because she was baking the products in her home kitchen that was never inspected to ensure there were no health code violations.

The bill sponsored by state Sen. Donne Trotter, D-Chicago, would have set up certain requirements so that people could operate bakery-type businesses from home if they register their kitchens and take a course in food sanitation.

BUT THAT GOT the ideologues amongst us all upset, saying they didn’t like the idea of requiring little kids to license their lemonade or cupcake stands. They banded together to kill the bill.

Statehouse priorities?

Which had some people saying the Legislature was abusing those kids with their stands. State Sen. James Oberweis, R-Sugar Grove – who also is Republican nominee for U.S. Senate – said he saw such kids as entrepreneurs. Which would make the concern for health issues an anti-business bill.

That caused the Illinois House to reconsider the bill with various amendments stripped out.

That finally got passed! Our Legislature took up the cause of a 12-year-old from Troy, Ill., so she can peddle cupcakes. Good for her.

THEN, THERE WAS the Illinois House, where a committee studied the issue of taxes on pop. A bill called for a one-cent per ounce excise tax increase on carbonated beverages. Which would drive up the cost of a bottle of pop.

It seems there are those people who want to treat pop the same way that cigarettes get treated – tack on so many taxes that the price shoots so high. If it winds up discouraging people from reaching for that extra can of pop like it sometimes keeps them from buying an extra pack of cigarettes, they see a purpose.

The House committee rejected the bill. Which means the idea is likely on the perpetual cycle of issues that will come up each year before the state Legislature.

Just like the budgetary problems that are likely to be deferred. Although why do I suspect that pop taxes will be solved before the state’s financial problems?

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N.Y. “pop” ban good if it hurts gougers

Yes, a part of me thinks that New York City municipal officials are being ridiculous for expending their precious time on trying to pass a ban on movie theaters selling those ridiculously-absurd sizes of extra large cups for soda pop.

BLOOMBERG: Health nut? Or idle hands?

You’d think Michael Bloomberg would have better things to focus on, and I suspect that is the motivation for many of the 51 percent of people who said in a recent poll that they oppose the mayor on this issue.

BUT I HAVE to confess, a part of me wishes that some Illinois-based official would push for a similar restriction.

Not because I believe that Bloomberg’s stated goal of improving the overall health of New Yorkers will be achieved by not letting them be capable of buying the obscenely-large cups that are sold.

But because I see it as a rebellion against every single snotty kid who works in a movie theater concessions stand and engages in an aggressive pitch to try to get me to buy the larger size because “it’s just a quarter (or 50 cents) more.”

I understand that the kid could care less what I buy, that he’s merely a minimum-wage worker, and that he’s following the instructions of his boss – the theater manager, who is pushing those larger sizes off onto people to bolster the bottom line of his particular theater.

WHICH LIKELY IS part of some large chain and that has some computer printouts available that judge the manager in question on how much pop and popcorn he can peddle.

Because I realize those $10 per person tickets for the actual admission to the theater don’t do anything for the profitability. The movie producers get the bulk of that money.

The theaters make their money off all the junk food they can sell you.

And to ensure that they can charge us prices that we would never pay in the real world (a.k.a., a Walgreen’s or a Jewel or perhaps a real candy story), they come up with those humongous sizes.

WE THINK THAT we’re getting our money’s worth when we pay something like $6 for a cup of soda because it’s somewhere around 48 ounces.

But who in their right mind is going to drink all of that in one sitting?

It’s either warm and/or flat by the end of the two hour-plus cinematic production. Or you actually managed to guzzle it all down, and you’re now thoroughly disgusting to everybody around you because you’re belching up a storm.

All that gas from having drank so much pop.

IT’S EVEN MORE disgusting than some of the films that are passed off as “horror flicks” but are really just collections of grotesque images strung together.

And if the only reason that exists for having such deformed sizes of pop cups in existence in movie theaters is to bolster a cineplex’ financial bottom line, that just isn’t good enough to me to justify it.

Let them die!

It wouldn’t bother me in the least to see more rational policies put into place when it comes to concessions. It has got to the point where I don’t go to a movie theater all that often just because I don’t want to be confronted with an orgy, so to speak, of obscenely-sized candies and cokes.

OF COURSE, I also have to admit that the main reason I don’t go to movie theaters regularly is because I can’t stand the crummy selection of films they show.

Just this week, my local theater (part of the Marcus chain) is showing Madagascar 3 and Prometheus on three screens each, along with Men in Black 3 and Show White & The Huntsmen on two screens each.

I suppose I should feel thankful that they have the Dark Shadows film restricted to one screen, and are not giving us that everywhere we look.

All in all, it reduces the number of films that actually get shown locally. I don’t like to have to make the long haul of a drive to see a worthy film that gets squeezed out of my local theater to enhance the “viewing opportunities” for certain dreck to be overplayed.

WHICH IS TO say that I think many of us are depriving ourselves of the chance to buy those perversely priced pop cups because we think the films themselves stink!

And we’ve certainly come a long way from the days when an animated hot dog, popcorn and pop danced across the screen, urging us “all (to) go to the lobby” to get ourselves a not-so-overpriced treat.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: I sort of agree with one-time Illinois Statehouse news broadcaster and state Attorney General spokesman Abdul-Hakim Shabazz that this pop cup ban is a nonsensical issue that Mayor Bloomberg should not be wasting time on. So I'll sort of support his "Do nothing" candidacy for public office at a date yet to be determined. A non-endorsement for a non-candidacy.

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