“No, Thank You”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 447, 31 August 1928, Page 9

“No, Thank You”

Women and Chocolates CIGARETTES NOW CRISIS IN COCOA TRADE (United P.A.—By Telegraph — Copyright) (Australian Press Association) LONDON, Thursday. The cigarette-smoking: habit among women has reached phenomenal proportions. The fact is now revealed that it may shortly break up the powerful British cocoa pool which dominates the cocoa situation in the world.

The impending crisis Is not only being felt iii Europe and in America, but in thousands of native villages on the Gold Coast and elsewhere. Authorities in the trade in Loi assert that women are buying cigarettes instead of chocolates, and that men are presenting cigarette cabinets to women instead of boxes of chocolates. Practically the entire cocoa industry depends on chocolates. They state that only an unlikely change in feminine tastes and fashion can avert the crisis. SHATTERED FORTUNES The report of the impending breaking up of the cocoa pool has created a sensation on the New York Stock Exchange, where prices have slumped to an alarming degree. London experts say a world slump is inevitable. Women’s fashions have already shattered fortunes in the woollen trade and have established the artificial silk millionaires instead. MEN THE OPPOSITE MORE CANDY, FEWER SMOKES The trade papers of English confectionery and tobacco manufacturing show by statistics that Englishmen are eating more candy and smoking less, while their women are smoking more and eating less candy, said an American paper recently. The causes were debated in London recently at a confectionery exhibition organised by the Manufacturing Confectioners’ Alliance, held at Olympia. The situation had become serious, the head of one firm said because “while girls had -gone off sweets, the deficit in consumption has not been made up by the men. Smoking kills the taste for sweets, and swSets kill the craving for smoking. We are not interested in how soon men will return to smoking. Our problem is how to increase the consumption of sweets among women.” War Caused It Another, on being asked to account for the change in the habits of the sexes, said: “The war caused it. The manufacturing of confectionery was cut down; that of tobacco was increased. Cigarettes were plentiful everywhere. The best sweets then made were sent to the front. In the trenches smoking was very often forbidden, but the men could eat on all occasions the millions of pounds of sweets sent over, while the women over there and at nome began to smoke because they considered it more in keeping with their war work than nibbling sweets. The men brought back the habit with them, with a particular taste for caramel flavours. “You can see them chewing toffee nowadays at horse and greyhound races. When they want strength of mind for a difficult niblick, they again chew toffee. As for the office, there is many a man to-day who keeps a bag of sweets beside him on his desk in the city. Sweet-eating has at any rate annihilated tobacco chewing in the lower classes and snuff-taking in the upper.”