Why is Juul worth $16B? It’s more like a cigarette than you think
It feels like there&#x27;s a premeditated process, here, in terms of timing.<p>1. Tobacco Cigarettes emerge as public health scare in the late 1990&#x27;s.<p>2. McDonaldsization of Coffee via Starbucks in the late 1990&#x27;s.<p>3. Cigarettes taxed and regulated with punishing costs and counter-media-manipulation.<p>4. Bindings introduced to market coffee with free wi-fi, boosting high-end coffee&#x27;s incidental exposure to novice internet users at a time when caffeine is very-nearly required to negotiate the ever-expanding terrain of new technologies. (it&#x27;s just good business, of course)<p>5. Millions of former nicotine addicts herded away from nicotine to expensive, premium high dose caffeine alternatives, serving as stimulant to wean many down off of nicotine cravings with new habits.<p>6. 20 years later, with ordinary tobacco cigarettes habits all-but-destroyed, across two generations of former users, and new technologies now well established, coffee habits can wind down. A mild campaign against coffee is introduced. See: acrylamide, poor stock performance, racial sensitivity incidents in liminal zones of large franchise chain restaurants.<p>7. Emerging technologies, now ready for maturity may be re-introduced with new players. These entities work to re-normalize a newly engineered and tested concept in managed synthetic addiction, with status symbol oriented marketing plays.<p>Why vaping is anything is beyond me, but I feel like this represents the fundamentals of a broader subversive program to phase out agricultural-plantation-oriented modes of daily-use otc psychoactives that play vital roles in common universal social norms that cut across a wide array of global cultural customs.