The grocery store I work at quite selling tobacco awhile ago just because the kickbacks from the tobacco companies weren’t very high anymore. It’s not a high profit item.
Maybe its users are dying faster from jaw, mouth and throat cancers than there are new users.
Surely suggestions here will be pretty useless if you don’t tell us where your store is. There are regional preferences as well as the income level of your clientele. I am betting that bulk tobacco/roll your own and chewing tobacco don’t move fast in a higher income neighborhood.
The problem with smokers is that they tend to be annoyed if you don’t have their brand unless they smoke something really rare. The best strategy would be to go big at first with a wide variety of the popular brands and slowly whittle it down as you see what sells.
Most of the corner stores around here don’t bother to really compete in the vape market but quite a few sell a small selection of juice for people unable to get to a proper vape shop.
Yes, because that’s the root of the problem: Marlboro men, Joe Camels and Budweiser frogs. If you cannot resist the siren call of the Marlboro man, then you deserve what you get.
And the government has been finger fucking the tobacco companies since forever, taking their campaign contributions, taxing the shit out of them, etc while looking the other way, as you infer. Tobacco is a drug, you’re the user, the tobacco company is the supplier and the government is the middleman that wants a cut. That’s all.
This also doesn’t address the issue of government trying to influence behavior through taxation or lack thereof. Cigarettes and booze are bad and children and churches are good. And many couldn’t disagree more.
The government is doing us a great service by taking the money away from the bad people, and giving to the good people! They’re like Robin Hood and the USA is he entirety of Sherwood forest!
The same terrible and taxing government whose food stamps and Medicaid you avail yourself of for hernia and alcoholism-related cirrhosis treatment, right?
Correct. I am paying for my poor choices. I have paid for decades into the system I now inhabit, along with the humiliation of addiction, unemployment and poor health. I freely admit that. But the government still shouldn’t legislate opinion or inhibit people’s ability to make a choice for themselves.
Which one of those things is taxation?
I hear a Shark Tank pitch in here…
The “Be Marlboro” campaign originally launched in 2011 in Germany, though it has expanded to more than 50 countries, according to the report, which said it’s intent is to revamp Marlboro’s image among “young adult smokers” and replace the Marlboro Man. But what it really does, the report charges, is target kids and teenagers and get them hooked on cigarettes early.
According to the report: “While tobacco companies claim publicly that they do not market to youth or design marketing campaigns that target them, a 2013 study conducted in low- and middle-income countries showed that 22% of five- and six-year-olds surveyed were able to correctly identify Marlboro cigarettes, the world’s best-selling cigarette brand.”
If you can read Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition about the history of the tobacco industry’s campaign to market to children, suppress medical research about hazards, spoof testing machines, and flatly manufacture scientific “evidence” that their products are not harmful, and still feel like the industry is just innocently selling a normal product and consumers are exclusively responsible for the results, you probably need to have yourself checked out for brain damage. Even the industry leaders were well aware of the harms of their products, the processing of the product to make it more addictive, and manipulation of the public. Next to tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock additive in gasoline, it is one of the largest scale efforts to conceal from the public known harms in service of vast profits.
Stranger
Medicare is…the excessive taxation on cigarettes and alcohol are another form of taxation, and that form of taxation is the “behavior modification” taxation I’m talking about.
The hypocrisy really stems from the perception that government taxes things like that “because they care about you”. Yeah, right.
The issue with chew is shelf life and going stale. And also the 147 new varieties of snuff out there. The cans are easier to display and maintain than the big pouches and/or plugs. In PA everything from gas stations to some little corner shops carry at least some snuff but for actual chew you need to hit one of the larger grocery stores.
I want nothing to do with tobacco or it’s promotion. I smoked for 40 years, quit in '91 but as I type I am on oxygen as a result of that filthy addiction. I now have COPD so bad that I often cannot breathe at all without oxygen help. Tobacco is an evil trap to the unwary and young.