So it’s official now. Despite pre-election promises the Coalition will ban open tobacco displays in independent shops from 2015 and they are seriously considering putting cigarettes into plain packaging. Retailers will have to sell an extra £20,000 worth of tobacco just to cover the average £1,000 cost of implementation.
Inevitably it’s difficult for independent retailers to take a positive view on this as today’s comments on the Tobacco Retailers’ Association website testify, it’s interesting to find many of the public are equally unimpressed, read their comments on the bbc website. The one consolation is, as Stef pointed out in his June blog, that retailers have a three-year window of ‘opportunity’ for tobacco sales as the display ban is put into place with supermarkets this October. If indeed the writing is finally on the wall it does of course mean that it is more important than ever to diversify your in-store offer to recoup this loss.
The Oracle
11/03/2011
Time to talk business with the tobacco manufacturers (TM) and start to create a new type of relationship with them moving forward. They will of course be funding all conversion costs of the supermarket tobacco displays and independents will want to know, for all the joint lobbying of Government on the ban, how will the TM`s support them in their conversions? Margin is also an issue.
Retailer representatives should also review their strategy – display of branded packets is one thing, blank packets are something else. Could blank packaging be traded off with some concession on the display? Is blank packaging effectively the removal of display?If packaging goes blank then counterfeit factories will sprout up as contraband from countries like Spain and Portugal would be less marketable in a white world. Counterfeit cigarettes are highly poisonous and will be disproportionally consumed by children.
My crystal ball visions a few years ago are all shaping up – has anyone yet worked out the end game of it all? I`ll let you into it….
More and more laws, stipulations, rules and conditions placed on a product like tobacco increases the chances of those that trade in this product to fall foul of legislation – sometimes unwittingly, sometimes through sheer ignorance and sometimes after doing your damnedest to comply. Newsagents generally have not been the best in delivering compliance at the best of times. Government will subsequently target newsagents through trading standards visits and due to a significant hard core of failures, Government will then impose licencing of tobacco trading. This is the level of control that Government requires over tobacco.
Through increased shopper audits and more draconian penalties for failure, the actual supply and availability of cigarettes and tobacco will start to dry up (and I predict will become the product that supermarkets will increasingly and exclusively sell). Proxy purchasing legislation will come in and this together with the strangulation of supply will start to affect the level of adult smokers in the UK – this all along has been the Governments main focus, not children (the main issue with children is alcohol not smoking as NHS annual surveys have tracked a decline in child smoking levels for well over the last 20 years!)
Impacting on adult smoking levels will at last start to have positive NHS budget implications and this, my friends, is in fact the end goal of Government.
For those of a more visionary nature working within our Associations, Alliances and Federations, you may ask what could and should they do next? My advice is that they should start to clean up the act of sales by their members by better delivering training , advice and support leading to the implementation of a voluntary best practice (licencing) `scheme` which should be developed into a national mandatory scheme endorsed by Government. Government would welcome this as it would rubber stamp the operation of the scheme and audit it regularly at a relatively low cost to them. Independent shops would be empowered through their own Associations and supermarkets would have to apply for their licences too. This would ensure there is a more equitable spread of stockists across the UK – not just supermarket dominance.
Tobacco product in the UK is today in a significantly unpredictable marketplace. Only those with vision and courage and the right skill sets will benefit in future. Licencing has been implemented in many other industries by active Associations driving positive change. The time to start this is perfect, but who will take up the baton?
The Oracle.
Abdul Qadar
12/03/2011
The Oracle does not need the crystal ball as lot of the things he mentions are becoming reality in Scotland. Tobacco registrations start on 1st April 2011 and nobody’s playing a joke on that one with hefty fines for not registering. On the plus side it becomes an offence for under 18 to ask for tobacco but can’t see many trading standards officers waiting to pounce on young people making the request.Proxy purchase law also kicks off on the same fools day and again don’t envisage the authoroties actively chasing people to give them a fine. We should be thankful to the English health minister for increasing the two year gap to three for small shops as the Scottish health minister wasted no time in adopting the same timtable for Scotland. Your mister has at least doubled the dispay area during transactions to 1.5 m squared and in a busy newsagent selling and filling it could mean a no display ban. We on the other hand are still waiting to see if lady will give an inch more than the size of a ciggrette pack to be able to pull it out of the gantry.
The only thing staring at me for 2015 is the Uk and Scottish Parliament elections are likely to fall on the same day and see what promises are made and not kept.Certainly intresting times ahead.