In its* relentless pursuit of excellence in reporting, the blogster wrote about the upcoming introduction of shock photos on cigarette packs in Germany a year ago.
You can see some examples of the then new packaging here.
And promptly forgot about it.
Until it stood in line today at a small town stationary store that doubles as a post office. The line of Germans returning boxes of stuff bought from online retailers moved slowly.
The gaze of the blogster wandered around the store, from greeting cards shelves to paper and writing utensils, up a rack of yellow postal service envelopes, onto the long counter, and finally beyond the counter.
That's where cigarette and tobacco packages were lined up neatly and - presumably - deadly.
Something felt odd, wrong.
As the line took a left turn to get to the postmaster, another store clerk showed up, asking the line if he could help with something else.
The generally taciturn blogster shook its head for 'no', then said, 'Well, something with the shelves seems odd, but I can't tell what it is. Did you refurnish since my last visit?'
The clerk looked behind him, then said, 'Oh, you mean the cigarette packages? Many manufacturers gave us these cardboard fronts', he continued. 'They use them to hide the shock photos'.
To illustrate the point, he reached up, folded down a pretty cover and revealed a package with its deterrent picture.
'Most of them, in fact', he corrected his initial assessment.
The blogster replied, smiling: 'Thank you very much for showing me'.
So, the repackaging of cigarettes as a business idea in last year's post didn't catch on. But the goal of hiding the images did obviously come up in discussions at the manufacturers.
*Gender neutral
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