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TOBACCO BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL
MARCH/APRIL 2015
trench marketing
BY MICHAEL GELFAND
I
t’s no secret that the majority of
today’s growing army of vapers
were once tobacco users. Some of
the converted moved away from tobacco
purely as a means to take advantage of
lower cost for a similar experience. But
many more have done so to pursue
perceived health benefits—and this latter
group’s passion for vaping has been
hardened by its antipathy for tobacco
products and its disdain for the people
who sell them. This has put Jeffrey
Kathman, owner of Cheap Tobacco, in
an awkward position because he sells
both traditional tobacco products and
e-cigarettes.
Kathman got his start in the tobacco
business in Cincinnati, Ohio back in the
mid-1990s working part-time for an
entrepreneur who owned a successful
chain of drive-thru stores that sold beer,
wine and lottery tickets. “I started running
those stores for him at the time that
he was just starting to branch out into
tobacco stores,” he recalls. Those new
stores, called Cheap Tobacco, operated
the store-within-a-store concept. “We
sold tobacco, lottery and alcohol, but
there was a special section that was
cordoned off to sell cartons of cigarettes
exclusively,” he says.
He got into the tobacco business full-
time in 1996whenhis delivery route rights
for the city’s newspaper,
The Cincinnati
Enquirer
, were revoked. “My boss at
Cheap Tobacco knew I had the capital
and experience, so he came to me with
an offer to buy a franchise and I jumped
Two Sides
ofthe
Same Coin
Cut Rate Tobacco is straddling both sides of the tobacco/vaping fence
by opening both freestanding and store-within-a-store locations.