NJM- you are correct that this type of tax is not good for NBEV, and its products.
As a veteran of years of battles involving the beverage industry working to optimize various bottle and can deposit/recycling laws, I can tell you that anything that raises the ultimate cost to the consumer is detrimental to sales volumes. And however the cities try to spin this, no matter who they target to pay the tax, the fact is that it is always the ultimate consumer who pays the tax, or decides to avoid it by not buying the targeted beverages.
The results from Philly are interesting. One would think that if the sales volumes are down so much that distributors are talking about big layoffs, that the tax revenue collected would be less than projected. However, the fact that the tax is collected on distributors, rather than at retail, may very well skew the tax revenue forward, and lower tax revenues will begin showing up as fewer sales lead to lower re-stocks and shipments.
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