More on Japanese Cigarette Madness. Man buys over $3,000 of Cigs at Once!

Once again, this morning I went to the big grocery store in the area here and they were sold out of almost all major brands of cigarettes.

This is really going to pump up Japan's GDP for the 3rd quarter:

From BusinessWeek:

A man walked into Yusuke Sato's tobacco store in Atsugi, southwest of Tokyo, last month and bought 100 cartons of Mild Seven cigarettes. While that may not be good for his health, it did save him almost $1,300 in potential cigarette taxes. Hoarding by Japanese smokers, who stocked up ahead of a big tax increase on cigarette manufacturers that took effect on Oct. 1, may have also given Japan the economic equivalent of a nicotine rush. A big spike in cigarette sales may add as much as 1.4 percentage points to the projected annualized economic growth rate for the July-to-September quarter, according to estimates from the Japan Research Institute. 


What in the world is this guy going to do with 100 cartons of cigarettes? I can't imagine that he's going to sell them... There's hundreds of brands of cigarettes and each likes their own. 


If you consider that there's 20 packs in each carton and 20 cigarettes in each pack; that comes out to 40,000 cigarettes! At one pack a day, this guy has bought enough cigarettes to last over 5 years!


100 cartons costs about $3,360 (USD). Read that again: Three thousand and six-hundred dollars worth of cigarettes at once. That's a lot of cigarettes! He could have bought a good used car (OK, well at least a junky used car!)


They'll never stay fresh in the humid Japanese summer heat... What's he going to do with all these cigarettes unless he, Ugh, wants to smoke himself to death before he has to buy any more!


But the Japanese government tax officials sure won't complain.