Convenience Store Cigarette Sales Grew in 2015

https://www.medpagetoday.com/pulmonology/smoking/63753

Cigarette sales in the nation’s convenience stores rose slightly in 2015, marking the first sales increase in a decade, CDC researchers said.

An analysis of sales trends for conventional and electronic cigarettes from the fall of 2011 through 2015 showed a small, but statistically significant, overall decrease in traditional cigarette sales during the period — with the exception of 2015.

E-cigarette sales increased significantly during the period, but year-over-year growth slowed, CDC public health analyst Kristy L. Marynak, MPP, and colleagues also reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

In an interview with MedPage Today, Marynak said the increase in convenience store cigarette sales in 2015 does not necessarily mean that more people are smoking. Instead, it may indicate that people who already smoke are buying more cigarettes.

The sales figures for convenience stores — as well as supermarkets, pharmacies, mass merchandisers, “dollar stores,” club stores, and U.S. military commissaries — were derived from retail scanner data collected by the Nielsen Company from September 25, 2011 through January 9, 2016.

Marynak noted that declining gasoline prices in 2015 may have contributed to the slight increase in cigarette sales in 2015.

“We know that smoking rates are disproportionately higher among people with lower incomes,” she said. “It could be that these lower income smokers used some of this saved income to purchase cigarettes,” she said.

More conventional cigarettes and other tobacco products are sold in convenience stores than in any other type of retail outlet, which is why the other sellers were grouped together.

Marynak and colleagues wrote that a decrease in year-over-year cigarette sales occurring among non-convenience store sellers around September 2014 corresponded with the discontinuation of tobacco sales at the CVS drug store chain’s roughly 7,700 outlets. The pharmacy chain was the first in the nation to stop selling tobacco products.

Because e-cigarettes are often sold in vape- and tobacco-shops, which were not included in the Nielsen data, the sales figures probably don’t paint a true picture of overall e-cigarette use.

Based on tobacco industry analyst reports, the researchers estimated that the retail outlets included in the Nielsen report accounted for less than one third of the $2.5 billion e-cigarette market in 2014.

The data showed a steady and large growth in e-cigarette sales between September 2011 and the end of 2015, but sales growth began to slow over time.

Commenting on the sales data study, American Lung Association national president Harold P. Wimmer noted that while overall cigarette sales declined slightly during the survey period, 11.2 billion packs of cigarettes were sold in convenience stores and the other retail outlets in 2015 alone.

“This amounts to 34 packs of cigarettes for every adult and child in the United States, and is a good reminder of how far we still have to go to eliminate cigarette smoking in this country,” he noted in a press statement.

CVS Claims Halting Tobacco Sales Has Reduced Smoking Rate

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