Dive Brief:
-
The National Association of Convenience Stores is urging its members to adopt the best practice of restricting the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, the same way they restrict cigarette sales.
-
More than 150,000 U.S. convenience stores had some $540 million in sales of e-cigarettes in 2013, the largest retail sales of the vapor cigarettes in the country.
-
Meanwhile, attorneys general from 28 states and U.S. territories Sunday sent letters to five drugstore retailers with pharmacies, including Rite Aid, Walgreens, Kroger, Safeway, and Walmart, urging them to follow CVS Caremark in ceasing the sale of tobacco.
Dive Insight:
Tobacco sales are coming under fire, and now e-cigarettes, considered a safer conduit for tobacco, are increasingly becoming a part of the anti-tobacco movement. Certainly drugstores, many of which are making moves to become bigger players in health care delivery, are finding how tobacco sales conflict with that. Look for tobacco to become a bigger issue for retailers as they feel more pressure, from within and without, to curtail tobacco sales despite their large source of revenue.