ABSTRACT
After the duty increase of 1900 Wills wrote to a number of manufacturers of ‘information which has proved to us the impossibility of unanimity with regard to prices and allowances’; in short, many retailers and wholesalers, and some manufacturers, seized upon this as an opportunity to make competitive adjustments to prices and terms. The Firm announced, there-fore, that it was ‘no longer prepared to be bound in any way’. Nevertheless, under pressure from other large firms it took the lead in endeavouring to maintain some uniformity on new prices and terms in the trade. But in making these changes Wills was quite unaware that it was, in effect, laying down some of the basic conditions on which it would have to fight the fiercest competitive battle in its history and, indeed, in the history of the U.K. tobacco industry. It is necessary, therefore, to begin by looking at Wills' pricing policy in a little more detail.
