CVS' no-cigarette policy long overdue, Northampton market owner says

It wasn’t a marketing study or Health Department sting that made Richard E. Cooper stop selling Marlboros, Winstons, Camels, Viceroys and dozens of other cigarette brands at his two stores.
It was a question posed by Rebecca Cooper, his then-5-year-old daughter.
“Why do you even sell cigarettes? They’re bad for people,” the youngest Cooper asked in May 2000 after one of Cooper’s clerks had been cited for selling cigarettes to a minor.
As CVS prepares to end cigarettes sales nationwide in October and other pharmacy chains face pressure to follow suit, Cooper’s experience shows that retailers can swear off tobacco sales without driving away customers.

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More than a decade before CVS, the nation’s second-largest pharmacy chain with 7,600 stores, decided to opt out of the tobacco market, Cooper was selling 121 varieties of cigarettes at Cooper’s Corner in Florence and the State Street Fruit Store, Deli, Wines & Spirits in downtown Northampton.
Business was good – about $36,000 a year between the two stores – but not without hassles. Despite training and warnings, store clerks were caught five times selling cigarettes to customers under 18, leading to fines and license suspensions from the city’s Board of Health.
The fifth time, in May 2000, turned out to be the last time, Cooper recalled Wednesday.
Within hours of learning about the latest violation, an exasperated Cooper was eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant with his wife and daughter, grousing about how mistakes by store clerks were hurting the stores' reputation.
“That’s when my daughter asked why we were selling them (cigarettes) to begin with; when I explained that we sold things that we didn’t use ourselves, she said, 'but they make people sick.' "
A few days later, Cooper showed up at a Board of Health hearing and turned in both licenses. “I don’t want to be part of the problem,” he told board members.

To his surprise, business at Coopers and the State Street Fruit Store improved in the next few weeks, even after the leftover cigarette inventory had been crushed and thrown into dumpsters behind the two stores.