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CIGARETTE AND liquor companies are in a tight spot. They have to sell hard in commodity markets, but overt pitches put them at risk for public backlash. The World Wide Web is especially tough because the Internet is widely considered correctly or not a young person's hangout.
Tobacco companies, with their holdings in food, beverage and other markets, are the largest companies in the world after oil and gas producers. But Web users wouldn't know it. Cigarettes are nearly invisible online.
Maybe the idea is to make smoking sites hard for kids to locate.
Philip Morris Cos., for example, isn't giving critics the chance to complain about appealing to underage Web users: It hosts no sites at all for Marlboro, Parliament, Virginia Slims or the five other brands that together make Philip Morris the No. 2 cigarette maker in the world.
The $69.2 billion company doesn't even have a general corporate site.
Attracting children may also become a tough issue for alcohol sellers.
The flimsy warnings many liquor sites carry - saying visitors must be of legal drinking age to enter - aren't likely to deter curious minors. And the cartoon mascots and interactive games that some alcohol sites offer may even attract kids.
But those are issues for the Federal Trade Commission to consider. On to the reviews.
R. J. REYNOLDS TOBACCO CO.
It took some digging to find the few big-name tobacco sites that do exist. The path to marketleader R. J. Reynolds' site, for example, is a button buried on RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp.'s corporate site. Neither the Yahoo...