Smokefree poster dairy sells smokes again
Although the poster dairy for a national smokefree campaign has reverted to selling cigarettes, other Palmerston North dairies are quietly continuing to kick smokes to the curb.
Moshim’s Discount House, on the corner of College and Ada streets, stopped selling cigarettes for more than seven years and was last year used in a Smokefree New Zealand campaign for World Smokefree Day.
However, owner Bhavin Patel said last year he was worried tobacco was a key product for dairies and that staying tobaccofree would be an uphill battle as he struggled to make up for the lost income.
Nine other Palmerston North dairies are still making ends meet without cigarettes.
Manoj Dutt, who now leases Moshim’s from Patel, said the cigarette cabinet was already back before he took over running the dairy in May, but tobacco sales weren’t a big part of his business.
Dutt said he wasn’t a smoker and he supported campaigns such as World Smokefree Day, because he saw the health beenfits of reducing the number of places selling tobacco.
But he didn’t see much point in Moshim’s ditching cigarettes again.
None of the dairy’s regular customers bought cigarettes there, Dutt said, and the cigarette cabinet was relatively easy to miss, so few people asked for them.
‘‘We only sell one or two packs a day. We don’t really let people know [we sell cigarettes], but if people ask we’ll tell them.’’
Patel did not respond to requests for comment this week.
Victoria Grocers owner Garry Sandhu has run his dairy, on Victoria Ave, for two years, without ever selling a single pack of cigarettes and business was doing fine.
Sandhu doesn’t feel there was a place for tobacco in a
community grocer.
‘‘Lots of families come in and cigarettes aren’t good for children... [so] we just didn’t want to sell them.’’
Sandhu said even if the dairy was slightly less profitable as a result, it was the right call for his family and community, and more stores should follow suit. ‘‘It’s not all about money.’’
Midcentral District Health Board primary, public and community health operations executive Debbie Davies said it would be best to restrict tobacco sales to specialised stores and the board ‘‘actively encouraged’’ dairies to stop selling tobacco.
Moshim’s was the only formerly smokefree dairy to start selling cigarettes again in the past year, Davies said.
A Stuff survey of the nine dairies who had ditched selling
cigarettes found the they ranged from the Cook Street Mini Mart on Main St, which stopped selling them nine months ago, to Palmy Food City on Cook St, which had done without cigarette sales for six years. Some of the dairy owners never sold tobacco.