Motivated by the growing deep-discount price segment of moist smokeless tobacco, Fas Mart is using premium products to drive volume and maintain store profitability. Since the late 90s convenience store retailers have experienced the rapid expansion of a deep-discount price segment, often referred to as the sub-price value segment, in the moist smokeless tobacco category.…
dipping into new profits
Premium products driving the moist smokeless tobacco business, U.S. Smokeless Tobacco says. An influx of deep-discount products is forcing retailers to change the way they merchandise moist smokeless tobacco (MST) products and experts are concerned that these changes are adversely affecting moist smokeless profitability. As the deep-discount segment has grown in volume, it is compressing…
a volatile mixture
With gas prices reaching obscene levels, sales of premium cigarettes could suffer in the short term. The past 10 months have been a pretty wild ride for Julie Van Alyea.Van Alyea, retail merchandise manager for Redwood Oil Co. (Santa Rosa, CA),has noticed a significant change in her most important instore category: cigarettes.While she has heard…
roll reversal
Eric Dean remembers walking into a store as a child with a note from his mother saying, “Please sell my son a pack of Pall Malls for me.” Things have changed a lot since then. Retailers have become much more responsible, for instance, by taking greater precautions to ensure that tobacco products don’t fall into…
Building Fanatics at Retail
A decade ago, RJ Reynolds took a journey to the center of its Doral brand, located its DNA, and began rebuilding it from the inside out. For convenience retailers, there is much to be learned from the example. Flash back to that infamous Friday in 1993, when Philip Morris took swift and dramatic action to…
a holy grail for tobacco
Seeking better ways to manage the cigarette category as a means of securing more gross profit dollars? A ’six-step’ analysis may help uncover hidden profits. Even though the “same firms” database of CStoreXchange (CSX) shows that 2004 cigarette dollar sales may approximate 1% more per store versus 2003, when you factor in tax and price…
nice n easys new face
A bold new store image helps Nice N Easy in its quest to become the ’Wegmans of convenience retailing.’ Nice N Easy Grocery Shoppes has no fear of going out on a limb. In the face of dwindling cigarette sales—the chain has seen its carton sales cut in half over the past five years due…
flavor boost
Cigars and moist smokeless tobacco items bearing exotic aromas and tastes account for much of the non-cigarette tobacco category’s recent sales growth. ‘Who would have guessed that apple would be such a strong flavor?" asks Kent Raphael, vice president of merchandising for Village Pantry LLC (Indianapolis, IN). He’s not asking about a hot-selling juice drink…
Sweet Surprise
Swisher International introduces the newest addition to the family Swisher Sweets Grape Little Cigars. This mild, sweet, new little cigar offers high profits per ring and is bursting with grape taste and aroma. It’s the perfect little cigar to sell and for customers to enjoy. Available in 10-pack cartons and displays with 20 Little Cigars…