Some stuff says this or “Not to be sold individually” or " Not labeled for individual retail sale".
Is there any reason why you could not ignore this and sell them individually anyway?
I’m pretty sure we’ve done this, and at least part of it is the fact that if it’s a food product, it doesn’t have the nutrition labelling it’s supposed to have on just the individual units. There was some more to it also, if I recall, but I’m too tired to dig for the thread.
Convenience stores near me open boxes of everything and sell them individually- cigarettes, oatmeal cream pies, popsicles, pop-tarts, etc. I doubt any of the clientele has complained about the missing nutrition information.
Aside from the nutritional labeling, what about other items such as cigarettes? Perhaps taxes are the reason they are not allowed to be sold individually if meant as a carton?
Cigarettes, at least in PA, are taxed by the pack. Breaking open the carton is acceptable and necessary, since cigarettes are shipped in cartons. Gene Frenkle may have been referring to the practice of selling “loosies”, individual cigarettes taken from opened packs, which is illegal in PA, probably elsewhere too.
Selling individual cigarettes also might run into problems with them not having the Surgeon General’s warning on them.
In New Mexico, liquer retailers are required to buy from licensed wholesalers, even though costco is cheaper. Costco has the “not for resale” signs up, but it is state law, not the terms of sale that put the teeth in it.
All of the above could be true. However, the major entity to crack down on this would be the manufacturer because this type of thing violates contracts. That would be bad news for a small store that gets on a banned sell list. Procter and Gamble of Phillip Morris don’t care about some small convenience store that violates the rules. They are too big for that. They will just cut them off for future deliveries. Most of the major companies have enforcement agencies themselves. My families store ran afoul of them once on cigarettes and it was really bad news although they were eventually cleared. They report any truly illegal activity to the police, ATF, FBI, or FDA. Screwing around with cigarettes stamps can get someone in prison just like selling less than legit alcohol. That is not something any small store owner wants to get busted with and there are usually many entities that might take them down for it.
Not to mention that most of these entities use plain clothes folks to come in and do the checks…if you pass you might not even know they were ever there.