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Adam Leadbetter is the owner of Leadbetter’s Quick Stop in Orono.
It’s hard enough these days for some businesses to make it in Maine without state lawmakers vowing to make it tougher. My family has been in the convenience business for nearly three decades.
As is tradition in the Leadbetter family, about five years ago I bought into my own location, Leadbetters Quick Stop in Orono. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind. There are permits to file, licenses to secure, regulations to follow, employees to hire, price changes to make, supply chain issues to solve, and the aftermath of a global pandemic to navigate. It’s all worth it, though, to get the chance to serve my community and support my employees with a job they like that feeds their families and puts a roof over their heads.
With a new law that’s been proposed to ban retailers from selling flavored tobacco in Maine, I must wonder if the people elected to represent me in the Legislature care at all about any of this. Flavored tobacco sales make up a significant part of our annual revenues that we use to pay for rent, salaries, utilities, and taxes.
Flavored tobacco bans won’t stop people from buying their favorite tobacco products. When the Bangor City Council passed an ordinance to ban flavored tobacco in the city last year, I immediately saw an uptick in my Orono store from tobacco users looking for a new place to buy the products they enjoy – whether it be menthol cigarettes, or wintergreen moist snuff, or flavored e-cigarettes, and cigars.
What did the Bangor council members achieve when they sent adult tobacco lovers from a store in Bangor to a store in Orono? They certainly didn’t stop those customers from using tobacco. They just inconvenienced them and took away the legal sales of an adult-oriented product from responsible business owners in Bangor and sent them to competitor stores, like mine, throughout the area.
This same scenario will likely repeat itself in the region but on a much larger scale if lawmakers choose to ban Maine businesses from selling flavored tobacco products statewide.
Maine’s small businesses and large retail employers could see more than just their tobacco sales plummet as customers travel across the border to New Hampshire, or to Vermont, or Rhode Island to buy flavored tobacco.
They could also watch the sales of ancillary items go, too. That’s because when a tobacco customer stops in to purchase a pack of menthols or wintergreen chew at their neighborhood convenience store, they may also pick up bottled water, a cup of coffee, a candy bar, a roll of paper towels, a tank of gas, or a hot meal. A tobacco customer likely won’t go to a store in New Hampshire to buy their flavored snuff but hold off on buying their other convenience items until they return home to Maine. They probably won’t make two stops. Sales of all these convenience items could go across the border and significantly hurt Maine businesses. Our losses could be our competitors’ gain, and no health benefit would have been achieved.
Smoking is at an all-time low in our country among adults. It is illegal to sell tobacco to anyone under 21 years old. We support and obey this law. Maine youth cigarette smoking has decreased significantly since the late 1990s, with only 0.6% of the state’s youth saying they are current smokers. The 2021 Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey shows nearly 99% of Maine high school students who said they vaped in the 30 days before they took the survey did not get their e-cigarettes from convenience stores or smoke shops. Most reported getting them from a variety of other sources like older friends, family members, online, or they borrowed from each other.
Not only do I believe a flavored tobacco ban in Maine would unnecessarily hurt the state’s businesses and the economy, but it could also reduce the millions of dollars in tobacco sales taxes that go to the state to fund important programs, including tobacco education.
Lawmakers have options for ending smoking among adults and preventing vaping among youth. They should enforce current laws, which prevent the sales of tobacco to anyone under 21 years old and they should use the millions of dollars collected in tobacco taxes each year to invest in education and ensure adults’ access to less harmful smokeless alternatives and cessation products. I believe retailers like me are on the same side as the Maine Legislature when it comes to public health. Let’s work with each other, not against each other.