The Winston Girls vs the Marlboro Girls
Here in The Philippines there are such things as cigarette girls. There are Winston Girls and there are Marlboro Girls. There may be others.
The Winston Girls get paid PHP 1000 (about $20 USD) per night to go to bars and restaurants and sell promotional cigarettes to customers. The Winston Girls make a share of the profit of the packs of cigarettes they sell. They told me they obtain the packs of cigarettes at deeply discounted prices and they sell them for PHP 30 to PHP 40 per pack (that’s $0.60 to $0.80 USD per pack). Yes, cigarettes are much cheaper in The Philippines. It is a smoker’s paradise.
The Marlboro Girls get paid PHP 2200 (about $45 USD) per night. These chicks carry tablet PCs with them, and allow purchasers to play a game on the tablet PC for a chance to win a free Marlboro lighter. I think I would much rather be a Marlboro Girl. They have such cool stuff. Unlike the Winston Girls, the Marlboro girls do not make any profit from the packs of cigarettes they sell.
Now, about their pay: PHP 2200 a night, if they work 20 nights per month, that’s PHP 44,000 per month. Executive pay for Filipinos starts at around PHP 22,000 per month. My top employee doesn’t even make that much, and he’s top-of-the-line sophisticated, educated, refined, and top management material. How do these girls get away with earning PHP 44,000 or more per month?
In America, this wouldnt happen, but here in The Philippines, anything goes.
Let me tell you why the tobacco companies can pay these girls so much. You hook one new smoker, let’s say he buys one pack of cigarettes per day, once hooked, for the rest of his life. Say the average starting age is 25. Say the average life-expectancy is 60. That’s 35 years of smoking. That’s 12,874 packs of cigarettes. If the tobacco company only makes $0.10 per pack, that’s still $1287.40 in profit (in today’s dollars) for each customer that gets hooked. $1287.40. That equates to PHP 60,507.80 for each person hooked.
I bet these Marlboro Girls and these Winston Girls each succeed at hooking at least one person per night. If true, that means that if they work 20 nights, they have earned the cigarette company PHP 1,210,156 (about $25,750 USD) in future profits from one month’s work. I am trying to be conservative on the profit margin here. The figures are likely to be much higher.
That’s why the cigarette companies can afford to pay such high salarieis. To them, it’s a pittance.
This kind of thing would not happen in America. This is an example of how American companies, worn out of the welcome, have expanded into frontier countries to exploit the people to make money. To kill people to make money.
You can see the Tablet PC she is carrying, above, slung under her arm. The Winston Girls said they were prohibited from being photographed, so I do not have a photo of one of them yet.
These girls were semi-sexy outfits. All of them are of Amazonian proporition. The average Filipina must be around 5’2″ in height, but all the cigarette girls I’ve seen so far were at least 5’6″ or more. I’m 6’1, and you can see this Marlboro Girl is no more than a couple of inches shorter than me. Even if she has 3″ heels, she’s at least 5’8″. I think the reason they hire these tall girls is for the semblance of healthiness. “Smoke our cigarettes and you’ll grow up to be strong and healthy like these girls.”
If there is any regret in my life it is that I started smoking at the age of 11, and while I have attempted to stop many times, I have never been successful. I stoped for 18 months one time, then went out with some buddies and smoked cigar. Within two months I was back to smoking cigarettes.