Why the sugar tax will fail

I don’t think there are many people who honestly don’t believe there is an obesity issue going on in the world and an issue that will take a massive mindset to change with education being the major thing that will be able to help but one of the ideas that have been floating around is the idea of a sugar tax (or “soft drinks industry levy”) which for the last two weeks or so officially started in the United Kingdom.

The logic behind this is pretty simple in that if you increase the price of sugar products that one of two things will happen. The first being the price of the drinks, foods etc will go up and the products that have less sugar or none will be cheaper and people will go over to buying them. The second is companies start using less sugar in order to keep the price around the same.

But what if I told you there was another option? The option that they just raise the price of the sugar-free drinks anyway because hey why not.

It might just be me but surely that beats the idea of the whole thing. And while you may be thinking that it is a one-off I also check the other drinks they had on offer (in Morrisons by the way) and it was the same issue. The ONLY drink I saw that was not the same cost was Cola and Pepsi – everything else was marked up to the same cost.

Now I have no idea if this is legal or not but it beats the idea of the levy in the first place. This is why it will fail – greed. Either make it so they can NOT be priced the same and have quite a difference between it or tax companies very hard that uses an over-amount of sugar until they cut down and also let’s make sure we educate people about the benefits of staying in an ideal weight and what people can do about it in their diets

On a personal comment about this whole sugar tax; I don’t think it is a bad idea myself. Having stopped talking sugar drinks for way over a year now I have quite a big problem drinking anything with an abnormal amount of sugar in it nowadays and I welcome this levy if it makes the drinks I like cheaper but not when it makes it cost the same as the sugar versions to “keep it fair”.

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For all those reading Tweaked for your Pleasure, I would be quite thankful if you could take any pictures of equal pricing for these drinks when you are out and about and post them as comments. It would be interesting to see if it is just Morrisons doing this or if other stores are doing this as well and even if its only certain brands and so on.