Why Did Cigarette Sales Rise in 2020 After Falling for 20 Years?

For the first time in 20 years, cigarette sales increased in 2020. That’s the conclusion of a new Federal Trade Commission report published yesterday.

Americans bought 203.7 billion cigarettes (about 10.2 billion packs) last year—an increase of 800 million cigarettes, or 0.4 percent. That breaks down to an average of about 300 packs a year for each of the approximately 30 million people who smoke, or a little less than a pack a day each.

Mainstream news outlets have focused on the coronavirus pandemic as the primary reason for the increase, but a more likely cause is the decline of the U.S. vaping market in recent years. There are multiple factors that have led to vaping declines:

Many of those factors led to price increases and reduced availability for vaping products. Economists have shown that cigarettes and vaping products are economic substitutes, meaning that a price increase in one causes a boost in sales of the other.

Vape flavor bans may have similar effects. A paper published earlier this year showed that high school smoking increased when a ban on flavored e-cigarettes took effect in San Francisco in 2019.