44
TOBACCO BUSINESS
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2013
less traveled than the one Tobacco Roll
is on. Instead of being forced out of the
business or turning to the club situation,
it reinvented itself.
Owner Roy Albert got in the RYO
machine business fairly early—by
April of 2010—so by the time the hard
regulations hit in July 2012, all three
of his machines had been paid off for
months (the first two cost $26,500 each
and the third was $31,000). He was
churning all profit and didn’t need to
worry about paying the equipment off.
At first, Albert actually considered
going the club route. He spent $6,000
with an attorney, he says, to create the
“Southfield Social Club,” but when he
was seeking out places in the township
where it could be zoned, he realized
that he didn’t want “to throw good
money after bad.”
So instead, he took his point-of-sale
(POS) terminal database of over 6,000
consumers andmarketed to them a little
differently.“I remodeled the store a bit; I
made it more cigar-friendly and started
having events. I put in furniture that
faced the humidors, I put another TV
in, and I also expanded the e-cig line,”
Albert tells
TB
. “Essentially, we turned
it into a smoking facility and I’m hoping
we will get a lot of people in here,
especially by the wintertime, to watch
TV, smoke and have a nice experience.”
Albert admits his business has
gone down 60 percent since his RYO
machine went away, but “we’re starting
to make some of it up on e-cigs, the
e-liquid and with cigars,” he says.
Even though Tobacco Road went
into business for the RYO machine
profit, Albert had the foresight to
make it a full-service tobacco shop,
which is why he is still in business
today, he says. “We sold then, as now,
RYO tubes, tobacco, premium cigars,
machine-made cigars, e-cigs, candles,
incense, shisha, hookah, and branded
cigarettes, too. The only difference is,
back then, I sold everything else cheap
because my profit was clearly in the
RYO machines. Now I’m looking to
make profit like everyone else in full-
service tobacco.”
TB
ROLLED
But
NOT
Gone
“I remodeled the store a bit; I made it
more cigar-friendly and started having events...
essentially, we turned it into a smoking facility and
I’m hoping we will get a lot of people in here,
especially by the wintertime, to watch TV, smoke
and have a nice experience.”
