Portal:Capitalism

The first alternative is suggested by the cigarette example, where putting higher taxes on cigarettes reduced their sales. We could put higher taxes on items that are harmful to health or safety. Such taxes would most likely be passed on to consumers. But they would accomplish the goal of reducing consumption of these items.

The second alternative is to apply a "nudging" strategy, which involves loading the choices in a way likely to lead customers to buy the healthier alternatives. Some studies show that high school students will end up eating healthier food if the healthier food items are put near the front of the cafeteria line. Students are usually hungry after classes and grab what they see first. Extending this idea further, we can imagine supermarkets such as Whole Foods giving better shelf positions to the healthier brands within each category. So, healthier cereals would be at eye level and cereals loaded with fat and sugar would be on the lower shelves.

A third alternative is to use "social marketing tools" to persuade people to make healthier choices. The 4Ps (product,price,place, and promotion) could be applied to convince people about healthier and smarter choices. Advocates of better eating would describe the benefits of eating the right foods and the bad effects of eating unhealthy foods. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City was the kind of civic leader who "counter-marketed" by trying to get supermarkets not to carry 16-ounce of larger sizes of sweetened drinks and ordering cigarettes to be put out of the sight of consumers.