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Ban, tax hurting cigar-shop owners
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Cigar Shop
Tony Marino, owner of ARM Cigar Co. in Boardman, OH talks about the cigar business.
By Rick Rouan
Tony Marino has moved his business and cut his inventory and overhead by more than half.
The smoking business isn’t what it used to be.
“The government wants this business to basically be zero,” said Marino, who owns A.R.M Cigar Co. in Boardman.
In the last several years, state and local government have led a charge to curb smoking. A voter-approved statewide smoking ban in 2007 has hurt business, and a national tax to fund children’s health care has put a dent in smoke-shop revenue, local owners have said.
Since May 2007 when the ban went into effect, the state has received more than 44,000 complaints from individuals and issued 3,100 warning letters and 1,800 fines, according to The Associated Press.
Enforcement of the ban is in contention now at the state’s 10th District Court of Appeals in Franklin County, an effort the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association supports.
“Not only should there be no such thing as legislated smoking bans, but the Ohio inspectors are slapping fines and citations willy-nilly against businesses that are doing all they can to enforce the law, said Chris McCalla, legislative director for IPCPR, in a prepared statement.
The law prohibits bar and restaurant owners from permitting smoking. The Buckeye Institute is challenging whether a smoker’s lighting up in an establishment qualifies as the owner’s permitting him or her to do so, said Maurice Thompson, director of the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law. The case could overturn previous citations, Thompson said, adding that the Buckeye Institute will challenge the constitutionality of the law itself in another case later this week.
“These fines are crippling small businesses,” Thompson said.
Local cigar-store owners said that they agree that the smoking ban has hurt business but that a recent national tax has had a greater effect.
“The government should just get rid of the smoking ban,” said Geno Bellatto, who owns Havana House locations in Boardman and Niles and a Plaza Book & Smoke Shop in Austintown. “If they’re going to keep taxing us, how are we going to stay afloat?”
One of President Barack Obama’s first actions was reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is funded in part by taxes on tobacco products. The new law increased taxes on tobacco products April 1, raising the taxes on a pack of cigarettes by 62 cents and the taxes on a small cigar by $1.01, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Those taxes have hurt the cigar industry, including local shops that already were reeling from the smoking ban.
“It blew the heck out of the cigar business,” Marino said.
Marino moved his business from Market Street, where he had a smoking lounge and larger selection, to Stadium Drive, where he has cut the size of his space and the number of cigars he carries from 500 to 200.
“I had a beautiful spot. I had to move. I had to downsize because revenue wasn’t coming in,” he said.
The efforts to curb smoking could be having a financial effect on the state budget too. A Federal Reserve study found that the statewide smoking ban in Illinois has resulted in losses of more than $200 million in tax revenue.
The state of Ohio made cuts to several state-funded agencies and programs this year as it sought to fill a budget gap of $3.2 billion.
For Bob Kosa, who owns R Cigars in Cortland, the combination of the downturn in the economy and the smoking ban have hurt his establishment.
“Before, I’d have people coming in that were buying cigars and going to the factory and going to work to smoke them,” Kosa said. “I used to wholesale to some of the bars, but I can’t do that anymore.”
Kosa is getting out of the business after 11 years as he retires to Florida, but he said that another business owner is taking over and keeping the smoke shop open.
“The market is still there,” Marino said. “That ban didn’t help. ... It was the tax that killed it.”
rrouan@vindy.com
Comments
If they were to go back to letting people smoke and keep the taxes the same we would all be paying less taxes. The whole idea has not stopped anyone from smoking and i still see the very lower class smoking so i look at it as the only way to get extra tax revenue in easily
Who cares? Cigars STINK!!! You want to smoke - pay for it in high taxes. The smoking ban is the best thing to happen to Ohio in many a year. Just thinking about being able to go out to a restaurant and not smell smoke even when you sat in non-smoking you could smell it. This is God's blessing to us all in Ohio and healthful too.
The tax exempt American Cancer Society tricked the voters of Ohio into voting for a ban with exemptions, only to have them removed AFTER they were voter approved. If they got away with it once, you know they will do it again. Thank you American Cancer Society, we never knew all you do. The private vets clubs of Ohio who thought they were exempt according to the ballot learned what they do. I'm sure they are remembering them with with their donations and estate plans.
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/...
How is the ban hurting these paces? I would think a cigar shop would have 80% of their total sales being tobacco sales, in which case they are exempt.
The Commonwealth and State governments, and the British-Australian Tobacco Company jointly funded the Australian Tobacco Investigation Committee to find areas suitable for good quality tobacco growth during the 1927-28 season. Around 1930, the tobacco industry expanded in North Queensland following government initiatives to combat growing unemployment and boost local economies which were suffering from the effects of a growing world depression. It seems that smoking bans and outrageous taxes greatly enhance economic recessions today. It's too bad our politicians fall for big pharma's propoganda to sell their own brand of nicotine. And didn't Obama promise no new taxes? What a lie! It's all about greed and our government is in on it all the way!
I had taken for granted how nice it was to be in non-smoking environs, until I went to a restaurant in southeast MI and was asked "smoking or non-smoking?" Since it was all one room, it didn't really matter.
I haven't figured out why anyone under 25 starts smoking - it's not like it's a cool thing to do.
President Obama's child health insurance bill with a 2,200% tax increase, hit one of the poorest minority groups in the entire country, people who have to roll their own cigarettes from bits of tobacco and scraps of paper. If states want to be moral, they would stop this kind of taxation on the poor! The SCHIP bill raised taxes on loose tobacco from $1.0969 a pound to $24.62 a pound!" If everyone stopped smoking, who would they target next? I bet if everyone's property taxes went up 2000% you would hear some major screaming! So where is this money now! What happened to this bill and the money it's raking in?
Google worlds oldest smokers, you'll find ALL the worlds oldest people are or were smokers! The benefits of smoking tobacco have been common knowledge for centuries, and big pharma knows this and would wipe out the competition. From sharpening mental acuity to maintaining optimal weight, the relatively small risks of smoking have always been outweighed by the substantial improvement to mental and physical health. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Tourette's Syndrome, even schizophrenia and cocaine addiction are disorders that are alleviated by tobacco. Tobacco shows promise to prevent colon and prostate cancer and the endorsement for smoking tobacco by the medical establishment is good news for smokers and non-smokers alike. The revelation that tobacco is good for you is trumped by the pharmaceutical industry's plan to substitute the natural and relatively inexpensive tobacco plant with their overpriced and ineffective nicotine substitutions with 98% failure rates for quitting for 1 year or more. Big pharma has spent billions demonizing the pleasure of smoking using social engineering and profits from bans that destroys private businesses. Follow the money! I read an article about a boy that OD'd on Nicorette gum given at school without parental knowledge. So, very quietly, pharmaceutical nicotine is pushed on 12 year old kids. If anyone doubted that the anti-smoking crusade leads back to Johnson & Johnson, the cat is totally out of the bag!
"How's the smut business, Jackie?"
"I wouldn't know, Dude; I'm in publishing."
I wonder how it will affect Monica Lewinski. What will she be taxed on?
I didn't realize how fortunate we were to have a smoking ban here in ohio until I went to a PA restaurant a while back and had to sit in a room that smelled like smoke. Smoke at home or in your car if you want to smoke.
marbee...."The benefits of smoking tobacco have been common knowledge for centuries,"
I've read some pretty stupid posts on this board but the one started out with the above statement tops the list. The bar has been raised.
marbee, thanks for that important health information. I think I will drive down to Sheetz and spark one up for my health. Maybe I'll give a cigarette to a kid too.
marbee, I think you should double check what you are smoking and make sure it's tobacco.
Readers should know that this "generalsn" is no ordinary commenter--he's a spammer.
His boilerplate floods every message board in the country (Google him). He seems one of maybe 10 shameless manipulators who try by sheer force of massive postings to make their lies true, overwhelming boards with misleading junk.
Noise intended to drown out truth is a typical, documented tobacco industry tactic. Generalsn hijacks the Vindicator's message board, forcing it to function as his own freebie PR Newswire.
It must be a full work-day to hit every message board in the country as he does.
And it's all anonymous; he doesn't have to stand up to spew this swill out in the open in front of a legislature, where he might have to account for himself.
Does Post-for-Pay exist? Read how corporations are taking their PR wars to the Internet without disclosure:
http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watc...
"Allegiances are not always explained. The most impassioned defense . . . on the blogs comes from Trevor Butterworth, editor of Statistical Assessment Service, also known as STATS. He regularly combs the Internet for stories . . . and offers comments without revealing his ties to industry."
(STATS was funded by the tobacco industry)
And once the Flat Earthers, Holocaust Deniers and Green Card Lawyers start following generalsn's spamming technique--bye-bye message boards!
"He seems one of maybe 10 shameless manipulators who try by sheer force of massive postings to make their lies true, overwhelming boards with misleading junk."
Guess that makes you #11, proMerkin.
Finally, Pfizer got busted for illegal marketing practices. Just a reminder of the sources of the bans, more concerned with "social change" than the bans themselves:
http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?ia...
And what the 99 million dollars was going to. Note on page seven the "inside -out", provision going for patios later, AFTER business owners spend thousands of dollars to build them to accommodate their smoking customers, clearly showing that the tobacco control activists have ABSOLUTLY NO CONCERN about local issues or businesses.
http://www.no-smoke.org/pdf/CIA_Funda...
Here's the "model ban" from page eight that many communities copied, printed, and passed. It's the "smoking ban for dummies" It only takes a few minutes to fill in the blanks naming your community, the administrators names, and blanks to customize it to your community according to the width of your sidewalks.
http://www.no-smoke.org/document.php?...
And an informal description of the handbook rules.
http://www.davehitt.com/blog2/the-nic...
He seems to much more "evidence" than proMerkin...I guess it is official, spammers are higher up on the evolutionary chain than proMerkin.
(Yeah, I said "evolution.")