Deadly Alliance: How Big Tobacco and Convenience Stores Partner to Hook Kids and Fight Life-Saving Policies

Tobacco companies enlist convenience stores as their most important partners in marketing tobacco products and fighting policies that reduce tobacco use, thereby enticing kids to use tobacco and harming the nation’s health. 

As other forms of tobacco marketing have been restricted, tobacco companies now spend 97% of their marketing budget — $8.6 billion a year — to saturate convenience stores, gas stations, and other retail outlets with incentives and reminders to buy their addictive products. Tobacco companies pay stores to ensure that tobacco products are advertised heavily, displayed prominently, and priced cheaply to appeal to both kids and current tobacco users. That has led convenience stores to be partners with — and front groups for — the tobacco industry in fighting restrictions on the sale of flavored tobacco products, higher tobacco taxes, and other public policies proven to reduce tobacco use.