| Ohio grocery 1 is a three-store self-described “gourmet supermarket” with 700 employees, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio. It was founded in the late 1940s, and continues to be owned and operated by one of the founder’s families. The store visited by the first author was located in a strip mall in a suburb of Dayton with a population of nearly 24,000. It had 12 aisles of food and personal care products; seafood and meat counters; a deli; produce section; bakery; pizza oven; salad, cheese, and wine bars; a florist; and a cooking school next door. The store regularly hosts food and wine tastings, and sells a wide variety of organic, gluten free, and specialty foods. It does not sell nicotine replacement therapy products. The store did not have any health-related messages on display, and did not advertise its tobacco-free policy in the store; however, an exterior sign advised that there was “no smoking inside the store.” In 2013, one of the stores hosted a “health fair” featuring informational materials on healthy foods and activities as well as samples of various healthy food products. Tobacco products were formerly sold in two of the three stores; when the newest store opened in 2002, it did so without tobacco sales. They received little negative feedback for failing to stock tobacco. Six years later, tobacco products were removed from the remaining two stores. One sold sushi in the space formerly occupied by tobacco products, while the other sold chocolates. The father and son owners of the store made the decision to end tobacco sales, and the managers supported it because “we all agreed … that we could probably do more with that space … than the cigarettes were doing with it” (Manager, OH grocery 1). The manager asserted that tobacco’s negative health effects was not a motivation for ending sales. Instead, the decision was a straightforward business calculation: tobacco sales were “a dying category” among their customers and tobacco did not fit with the store’s focus on “selling great food” (Manager, OH grocery 1). Customers were informed of the impending change by word-of-mouth, and, while some were disappointed at the inconvenience, most of them understood the decision. OH grocery 1 did not advertise its decision publicly, but it did inform members of an informal group of specialty retailers to which it belonged that it had stopped selling tobacco and that there had been no negative impact. |
