So you're standing at the bar, or at the edge of the dance floor, or out on the club's terrace, having a smoke with your friends. And suddenly, there's another person in your midst, a young, attractive guy or girl with a courier bag slung low on one hip.
"What's up?" says the guy or girl, when an appropriate opportunity presents itself.
You mumble something noncommittal, or smile winningly and raise your chin in greeting, or shout some nonsense you think is charming but isn't, depending on how much you've had to drink.
Then the guy or girl asks the coolest, most serendipitous question he or she possibly could, barring a query into whether or not you'd be interested in taking him or her home for an evening of champagne and oral sex:
"So, does anybody want some free cigarettes tonight?"
Of course you do. What smoker doesn't want free cigarettes? You've only got, like, 17 of 'em left in your pack, and it's still early, and you just know Riley's going to start with the bumming any time now.
"Great," the young, attractive guy or girl says with a smile. "I just need some information …"
He or she produces something that looks like a cross between a PDA and a countertop credit-card swiper from the courier bag, and feeds the information from your driver's license into it while asking if the address on there is correct and what brand you usually smoke.
When it's over, he or she hands you one or two fresh packs, and maybe a lighter or a mesh-backed cap or a collapsible weatherproof travel ashtray that's also a reading light. He or she smiles again, and thanks you. Then, he or she turns to the five or six people who have noticed what's going on and have queued up to get their own swag.
By now, there can't possibly be a nicotine-addicted veteran Tampa Bay nightlifer for whom the above scenario isn't immediately familiar. The area has been a key stomping ground for cigarette promotions and field marketing since the mid-'90s. (God knows exactly why, but I suspect Tampa's disparate demographics and schizoid small-town vibe/big-city aspiration dichotomy have a lot to do with it; I travel frequently, and I might be wrong, but everywhere I go, there seem to be as many people for me to bum smokes from as there are here.)
First came Camel's street team. Then the Winston people, test-marketing a purportedly additive-free cigarette and an ill-advised ad campaign anchored by the face of a guy who looked like Colonel Sanders after a visit from the Queer Eye crew. Then Camel upped the ante, achieving a sort of after-dark ubiquity by hiring what seemed like every unemployed hipster in town, and providing so many free coffin nails that folks would boast about how long it had been since they'd actually had to buy a pack.
Various tactics were employed. Winston held focus groups, paying roomfuls of people $20 a head to tell them their titular Southern-gentleman icon sucked; they stopped doing it when they finally realized the same 40 or so people – mostly friends of their young "street team" – were attending every session.
Camel threw lavish Middle Eastern-themed parties in clubs large and small; they stopped doing that when they realized they were spending a shitload of money on a group of people who, by and large, already smoked Camels, and just wanted free drinks for their other hands. (Also, I heard that somebody broke their golden camel statue while trying to mount it at one of the last parties.)
It always came back to the young, attractive guys and girls with the low-slung courier bags, hanging out and asking if anybody wanted some free cigarettes. The gaudy apex of Tampa's smoke-pimp saturation passed around the turn of the millennium. Smaller brands like Lucky Strike have since entered the fray, but everything is much more low-key – so low-key you might think the tobacco companies are no longer interested in what Tampa Bay is smoking.
But they are. A couple of months ago, I snagged a free pack of Pall Mall Lights, which taste kind of how I imagine smoking a dead cat would, were one to set its whiskers on fire and affix one's lips to the spot directly under its tail. Along with the smokes, I also got a nifty plastic stopwatch that I can neither set nor control; it beeps loudly at odd intervals, possibly whenever it thinks the perfect time for a tasty Pall Mall Light has arrived.
And the recent Snoop Dogg show at Jannus Landing featured its share of Camel street-teamers, perhaps signaling the rise of another Golden Age for those of us who hate buying cigarettes but seem to lack the willpower necessary to quit for good.
I don't blame these people for perpetuating a deadly habit I'm dumb enough to continue to nurture on my own. And I don't mind handing over my driver's license in exchange for a couple of free packs. I know that nothing's free; what I'm really giving them in exchange for cigarettes is information, and an address they can send coupons to later, aware that I'll never have them on me when I need to buy cigarettes.
That's the thing that I find disagreeable about this type of enterprise. Not that it's evil or Orwellian or unhealthy, but that it's pointless. Because at the end of the run, when all the statistics have been tabulated, the marketing companies and the tobacco companies will have culled only one (1) proven, unshakable fact regarding their consumer base from all of it. And any one smoker would've told them, had they asked.
That fact is this: We will smoke any brand of cigarette, even one that tastes like burning cat ass, if it's free.
That'll be $700,000, please.
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.