Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 23, 1993 TAG: 9309230032
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
But you'd better do it by Friday. After 19 years of offering visitors free guided tours and free packs of smokes, Richmond's signature industry is closing its doors to the public.
Gone will be a uniquely Southern attraction that drew more than 50,000 people a year and helped define the image of the city where tobacco warehouses still perfume the streets almost every morning.
"We looked at the tour business and we came to the conclusion that it didn't help us focus on our core business here in Richmond, which is cigarette manufacturing," said Philip Morris spokesman Jim Poole.
But with more than 9,000 employees and only four of them dedicated to the tours, some see more than economics behind the company's decision.
"The tobacco industry is under a tremendous amount of pressure. Smokers, as we all know, have become almost pariahs in our society," said securities analyst Guy P. Chance of Scott & Stringfellow Investment Co.
"I think in light of that negativity, Philip Morris has probably decided it is the better part of valor . . . to keep a real low profile on the subject of the manufacture of these cigarettes."
The fact that the plant yields almost 600 million cigarettes a day, Chance said, doesn't impress people much anymore. A recent study claimed that every cigarette shaves seven minutes off a smoker's life; by that reckoning, the factory's daily output amounts to something like 7,900 years of lost lifespan.
The work area of the Richmond factory features a 200,000-square-foot, parquet wood floor - as big as four football fields - covered with machines that each can assemble up to 10,000 cigarettes a minute.
The process is surprisingly simple: Tobacco comes up from silos under the floor and feeds into rolling paper, making long rods that are cut to cigarette length. A cellulose filter drops between every two cigarette sections and the three pieces are wrapped together, making a long, dual cigarette with tobacco on either end and the filter in the middle.
Cut the filter and you get two cigarettes. They're wrapped in packs, cartons and finally cases.
The plant makes Marlboro, Virginia Slims, Merit, Benson & Hedges, Basic and Parliament brands. The Marlboro machines, for the record, appear no more macho than those that make Virginia Slims.
In fact, Marlboro was introduced in the 1920s as a women's cigarette; one version even had red-tipped filters to help hide lipstick marks. Marlboro promotion didn't turn manly until the 1950s.
That's just one of the facts you can pick up in the tobacco museum that kicks off the plant tour. Installed just five years ago, the display is arranged like a time line, showing the history of tobacco from the early Mayans to Philip Morris' acquisition of food makers, first General Foods and later Kraft, both in the 1980s.
Philip Morris Cos. Inc., with headquarters in New York, is the largest consumer products company in the world, with 1992 operating revenues of more than $59 billion.
But the plant tour is a wisp of its former self. Trams that used to cart tourists through the factory are gone. Visitors now view a 20-minute film, then march up to what used to be the gift shop - counters stripped bare - simply to look out over the enormous manufacturing area.
After looking out at the plant, most of the group eagerly follows the guide to get a complimentary pack of cigarettes. A dozen more visitors wait to follow suit.
By next week, only people with business interests - vendors, analysts, foreign dignitaries - will get access to one of the last places where smokers are truly welcome to indulge their habit.
by CNB