By David Bishop
Did you smoke when you were young?
If you did, how did you get your cigarettes — did you steal them from your mother’s purse, get them from a friend, or did you, in fact, actually buy them from some unsuspecting retailer? These days, that third option is becoming less and less commonplace.
Thankfully, limiting the sale of tobacco to underage youth is one place where retailers are gaining ground these days. Right now, the shaky economic, political and social climate in the United States presents various challenges for responsible retailers who sell tobacco products in their store — such as increased taxation and restrictions — but preventing the sale of tobacco to underage consumers is one area within a retailer’s direct day-to-day control.
The implementation of merchandising, training, monitoring and enforcement programs — via the combined effort of government, supplier and retail organizations — has helped reduce underage access to tobacco at the retail level. But retailers cannot afford to become complacent. Recently, three CVS drug retail locations in Massachusetts were caught selling tobacco to underage consumers. They now face a range of fines from $100 to $200 per store. And, for one of the stores, just one more future offense could mean a $300 fine and revocation of its tobacco license. For store operators who sell tobacco illegally — knowingly or otherwise — the consequences can prove devastating to your business.
In 2007, approximately 3.1 million (12.4 percent) of youth age 12 to 17 reported using a tobacco product within the past month, according to the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The 2007 usage rate is nearly five percentage points lower than the 1999 rate of 17.3 percent, which was the first year the group reported this combined measure.
And, according to the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) (See chart 1), the following was discovered:
- Usage rates of high school students for any tobacco product (cigarettes, cigars or smokeless tobacco) decreased between 1997 and 2007 by nearly 18 percentage points, from 43.4 percent to 25.7 percent, representing a decline of 41 percent over a 10-year period.
- Cigarette use among high school students declined from 36.4 percent in 1997 to 20 percent in 2007, for a total decline of 45 percent.
- Cigar use dwindled from 22 percent in 1997to13.6percentin2007amonghigh school students — a 38 percent decline.
- Smokeless tobacco use by high school students declined from 9.3 percent in 1997 to 7.9 percent in 2007, a decline of more 30 percent.
The numbers show that tobacco use by high school students has declined over the past decade, but why? Obviously, public sentiment, concern over health issues, price inflation and state legislation can take some of the credit, but it turns out that tobacco is getting harder for teenagers to purchase.
The 2007 Teenage Attitude and Behavior Study (TABS), conducted by Philip Morris USA’s Youth Smoking Prevention Department, revealed that among 11- to 17-year-old current smokers who reported obtaining cigarettes within the past 30 days:
- A majority (69 percent) reported that they “borrowed/bummed from someone else,” usually a friend or classmate.
- Four out of 10 (40 percent) indicated that they obtained cigarettes through a third-party purchase. (In this case, nearly three-quarters indicated that it was a friend or classmate who was not of legal age either.)
- Slightly more than one in five (21 percent) claimed that they purchased cigarettes themselves. And of those reporting a self-purchase, 76 percent stated that they bought cigarettes from a retail store.
- Nearly nine out of 10 (87 percent) who bought cigarettes at retail highlighted “convenience store or gas station” as their place of purchase.
The numbers might not sound impressive in this context, but what’s important is that it appears, based on various sources, that fewer youths are purchasing their own cigarettes today. The TABS results reveal that the amount of 11-to 17-year-old current smokers indicating self-purchase within the past 30 days has dropped by nearly 7 percentage points, from approximately 28 percent in 2002 to 21 percent in 2007.
And YRBS measures indicate that current smokers under 18 years of age, who usually obtained their cigarettes by buying from a convenience store or gas station, has declined from 19 percent in 2001 to 16 percent in 2007.
Although the decline is good news, convenience stores must continue to be vigilant with their prevention programs. Youth access to tobacco may be dropping, but the likelihood that teens are trying to purchase tobacco products illegally at a convenience store is much higher compared to other retail formats.
Where youth attempt to purchase cigarettes is influenced by at least two key factors: successful previous purchases and familiarity with the store clerk.
According to the 2007 TABS results, among the 11-to 17-year-old current smokers who reported buying cigarettes at retail:
- 71 percent typically go to a store to buy cigarettes where they’ve made a prior cigarette purchase. (See chart 2.)
- 79 percent of 11- to 17-year-olds who go to the same store do so because they think or know that the clerk will sell them cigarettes. (See chart 3.)
- 82 percent of youth who think or know that the clerk will sell them cigarettes report that the clerk is someone who knows them personally or would recognize them. (See chart 4.)
And, although it’s the law for retailers to require proof of age, nearly two-thirds of the past 30-day cigarettes self-purchasers reported rarely or never being asked to provide identification.
Retailers have demonstrated a dramatic improvement in reducing youth access to tobacco products, as measured by retailer violation rates (RVR). Consider the results since the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) instituted annual monitoring in 1997 through the Synar Amendment:
- The average national RVR has dropped from 40.1 percent in 1997 to 10.5 percent in 2007. (See chart 5.) This is the lowest rate since reporting began in 1997.
- 2007 marked the second year that all states achieved the federal RVR target of 20 percent; the first year was 2006.
- The highest reported RVR at the state level has declined from 72.7 percent in 1997 to 22.7 percent in 2007. And all the state rates in 2007 met the federal regulatory requirements.
While these state-level downward trends are positive, there’s some indication that the RVR could be reduced even further in the near future. For instance, according to an August 2008 presentation, given as part of a progress review related to the Healthy People 2010 initiative, the National Center for Health Studies suggested that a new target rate of 5 percent or less is necessary.
Retail strategies to prevent tobacco use by underage youth typically involve three key components: staff training, in-store tools and ongoing management.
While there’s an array of training support materials available from nationally recognized programs, such as We Card, some retailers develop their own internal programs instead. The Parker Companies and Ricker Oil incorporate role-playing as part of new employee orientation.
The role-playing exercises enforce the importance of this kind of training to an employee. It also clearly establishes expectations for how the company responsibly sells tobacco, which may include asking for ID for anyone appearing younger than age 27, checking the expiration date on an ID, and entering the date of birth from the ID card into the register or an age-verification device.
Additionally, customized training allows the retailers to educate employees about state-specific regulations or procedures. Ricker Oil trains employees to always check the ID of anyone appearing younger than age 27 before scanning the tobacco product. If the employee doesn’t verify age, and the state was performing a compliance check at that time, the transaction would fail because the state assumes that the sale will occur once the item is scanned.
In-store prevention tools include the familiar We Card window and door decals as well as its counter-top calendar — a program many retailers have implemented. Many retailers have also configured their register or added another device that requires an employee to enter a date of birth before a transaction is authorized.
The old adage, “What gets measured, gets managed,” couldn’t be more true when it comes to tobacco sales. The key to improving compliance, according to David Gaudet, president of The BARS Program, is to build a strong mandate from the home office and include everyone in the field as well. This involves regular updates and an understanding of where the various stores stand relative to state compliance rates.
To make sure a compliance program doesn’t run off the tracks, ongoing management generally includes aspects of monitoring, reporting and reinforcing the store policies and the laws of the state. Both The Parker Companies and Ricker Oil embed program monitoring as part of their broader mystery shopper programs.
At Parker’s, the mystery shopper carries a listening device that enables a human resource manager to hear the sales transaction from outside the store.
If the employee fails the compliance check, the HR manager enters the store and terminates the employee immediately. If they pass, the employee receives a cash bonus from the company.
At Ricker Oil, they follow a procedure similar to the We Card service, flashing a red card if the employ fails and a green one if they pass. If the employee fails, not only is he or she required to go through additional training, but so is the entire store staff. Ricker’s also rewards employees with a cash bonus for passing a compliance check.
The results from all of these combined efforts to reduce underage access to cigarettes and other tobacco products are clear: Young kids don’t think it’s so easy to buy tobacco from retailers anymore.
In fact, according to The Monitoring the Future Study, published in April 2008 and conducted annually by the University of Michigan, the rate of eighth and tenth graders who indicated that it was either “fairly easy” or “very easy” to get cigarettes declined from 1997 to 2007 by 20.4 and 11.4 percentage points, respectively. (See chart 6.) (Note: The Future Study measured the difficulty in obtaining cigarettes. See the Tobacco Accessibility section of this article for trends relative to how youth obtain cigarettes.)
The challenge still remains for convenience retailers, however, as the majority of the students in both grades perceive that it would be “fairly easy” or “very easy” to get cigarettes in general. However, as the TABS research has demonstrated, many other sources — not just retailers — provide youth access to tobacco produces.
The Coalition for Responsible Tobacco Retailing, of which NACS is a member, offers a retailer education and training program, widely recognized as the aforementioned We Card program.
According to Read DeButts, executive director of the coalition, the We Card program has trained more than 102,107 retail employees with a reach of more than 1.1 million employees. More than 1 million We Card kits have been distributed, along with hundreds of thousands of POS material and age calculation and training tools, to retailers nationwide since the organization began supplying materials in 1996.
Additionally, in 2008, almost 60,000 retail employees were trained using We Card’s online training at www.wecard.org. At the Web site, retailers can order training tools, download free materials, check state laws and sign up for the compliance monitoring service.
We Card also offers retailers the ability to monitor store clerks with periodic in-store compliance checks called We Card ID Check, which includes verifying that the store clerk requests proof of age from anyone under 27. And, according to results reported by The BARS Program, which administers the We Card ID Check service, participating retailers have improved their compliance rate by 40 percentage points after 12 months of routine, bimonthly checking, increasing from a 65.8 percent compliance rate to a 95.5 percent compliance rate.
Convenience retailers have played a critical and positive role in helping to reduce youth access to tobacco. And, with continued improvements to consumer education in the stores, the training of employees, and monitoring compliance with the law and policies, retailers can continue to demonstrate that convenience stores are socially responsible retailers of a legal, age-restricted product such as tobacco.
David Bishop is the managing partner at Balvor LLC, a sales and marketing consulting practice located in Barrington, Illinois.