NOTEBOOK – One Good Read: How retailers in Philly are responding to the city’s beverage tax
JOE GARDYASZ Sep 12, 2018 | 4:06 pm
1 min read time
187 wordsAll Latest News, Government Policy and Law, Health and Wellness, The Insider NotebookPhiladelphia’s tax on sweetened beverages is souring retailers on carrying as many sugary drinks in their stores, and that would seem to be a sweet deal for their customers’ health. The National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, highlighted in this article by Mathematica Policy Research, is the first to estimate the year-old policy’s impact on prices and beverage availability in stores throughout Philadelphia. Overall, the tax is doing what it’s supposed to — making sugary drinks more expensive and less available. Besides offering more non-taxed bottled water for sale rather than sweetened sodas, sweet tea and sports drinks, Philly’s beverage manufacturers, distributors and retailers are on average passing the full 1.5-cent-per-ounce tax on to consumers, rather than absorbing some of the increase — which has happened in some other cities that have enacted taxes on sugary drinks. David Frisvold, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of economics at the University of Iowa, said the tax’s influence on retailers stocking more bottled water is particularly interesting. “No previous studies of beverage taxes have examined changes in the availability of beverage types,” he said.