It's Thursday. I'm Oscar Emiraz from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. Cigarette smoking may have had a comeback during the coronavirus pandemic. Americans are spending less on travel and entertainment and as a result or having more opportunities to light up. We're also seeing that some people are moving away from vaping and returning to traditional cigarettes after restrictions on e cigarette flavors.
Jennifer Maloney, reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Jennifer, Thanks for having me some of the side effects of the pandemic. An interesting thing, cigarette smoking is making a comeback. People are spending less on travel and entertainment. Uh, they're spending more time at home and having more opportunities to light up. They're also switching back to traditional cigarettes more from vaping devices.
Jennifer tell us a little bit about this. Well. The maker of Marlborough cigarettes, a company called Ultria UM, makes a quarterly disclosure on how it's businesses way, and this week they disclosed that the cigarette business is doing a lot better than they thought it would be. UM they revised their projections and said that, you know, although we've been seeing a decades long decline and cigarette sales, that
actually the picture is looking a lot rosier. And they say that it's in part because people are at home, not going out and socializing with friends as much during lockdown, and have more time to smoke. They say that, yes, unemployment numbers are high, but stimulus checks are helping low and middle income cigarette smokers afford their packs of cigarettes.
And at the same time, they say that the recent restrictions on e cigarette flavors that the federal government put in place have motivated some people to switch back to traditional cigarettes. Yeah, I've been a lot of public health advocates are not gonna like hearing that mulist checks in increased undemployment benefits is making more people still buy them. But one of the interesting things that they said though, they said that the trend is significant enough to slow
down the year's long decline. So to be clear, cigarette smoking is not necessarily going up. Uh, you know, it's not going into other territory. It's just kind of slowing that decline right now. Right, So for many, many years um, the number of cigarette smokers has been on the decline in the US, cigarette sales has still been a very profitable business for the big tobacco companies, but they have
had to adjust to kind of a predictable decline. Every year they've seen like a four to six percent decline and cigarette sales. But this year that number is looking a lot better for them, So they revised their projections for the year and they said that cigarette sales are expected to decline only between two and three and a half percent. That's a big difference for them. On the e cigarette side, i'll Tria, as you mentioned, you know, they owned Marlble Marlborough. They made a big wager on
e cigarettes in eighteen. They bought a huge steak in Jewel Labs. But you know, Jewel Labs went through a bunch of different problems that you said. The f D a kind of limited the sales of the fruity h and mint flavors of the cartridge cigarettes, and then there was that whole vaping related lung illness, which actually wasn't really related to the cigarettes themselves. It was more vaping products with THHC. But still overall that kind of put
a damper on the e cigarette business. It did, so it was it was a rough year, uh for e cigarettes. If you think back to last fall, UM, there are headlines in the news every day around vaping and e cigarettes, whether it was the surge in young people vaping and public health officials trying to figure out how to stop children and teens from vaping. UM. Then there was this mysterious long illness that seemed to be linked somehow to
vaping devices. UM. The c d C put out a recommendation not to vape anything, including traditional e cigarettes you know that that deliver nicotine. UM. Then they revised that advice as more research came in indicating that the illnesses were linked to vitamin E oil in marijuana vaping devices.
But at first they were saying don't vape anything. So all of that contributed to kind of a damping effect on UM vaping and some people sort of the main takeaway from all that news coverage was maybe e cigarettes aren't such a great alternative. I'm going to switch back to cigarette still. The group that took back to cigarettes leaving you know, the vaping scene were Americans older than fifties.
From what Altria said, and you know, you have to obviously they're talking in a business sense but it sounds so nefarious sometimes. They said it benefited the entire cigaret at category people kind of moving away and going back to traditional cigarettes. They have said that the demographic that they see shifting back to cigarettes is this fifty plus adults. And they further noted that those older adults tend to
prefer discount cigarettes. So it's actually hurting Marlborough's share right now of the cigarette category because as these older adults switch back from the cigarettes to cigarettes, they're not buying premium brands like Marlborough, They're buying the cheaper ones um and so that's chipping away at Marlborough's market share. Wow, what an interesting look and to see, you know, how things change over time and throughout you know, a pandemic
as we're going through. Jennifer Maloney, reporter at the Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm Oscar Ramires and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out in the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Fridays, So follow us on iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcast