Almost as if there were some great incentive to smuggle cigarettes.
When I was a young guy working at an auto plant in Ohio in the late 60s, there were always guys with trunk fulls of low tax Kentucky cigs selling at shift change.
And that was when the difference in price was literally pennies.
Back then I had never heard the word “arbitrage”
[ Almost as if there were some great incentive to smuggle cigarettes. ]
Almost seems like it...
Pretty soon you can start smuggling sugar and trans-fats into NYC for great profit!
In nearby NJ I’ve bought cigarettes with stamps in Cyrillic letters, Chinese, and some regular ones (all with no tax stamp at all). So many foreigners run convenience/liquor stores here they probably have friends passing through the revolving door that is this country’s borders bringing in the maximum duty-free cigs they can.
They can’t even stop these people from selling alcohol to minors; by marginalizing the WASP ethic that built this country they have set up the most amoral society one can imagine.