The city of Tempe is our home, and we are proud to have rooted ourselves here. To invest our heart into building a family and small business dedicated to serving the needs of the neighborhoods and communities around us. Like most of us here, we’ve watched the city mature from a college town into a thriving hub for businesses and entrepreneurs.

We offer the communities around us daily food items, sodas and personal necessities among an assortment of other goods including alcohol, fuel and tobacco products. We enjoy being an integral part of the fabric of our community, but now we find ourselves with an uncertain future. Local ordinances are seeking to ban popular legal products for adults restricting choices available to consumers and harming the viability of our business.

There are nearly 4,000 retailers just like us who are having their livelihoods threatened by attempts to create an inconsistent patchwork of laws prohibiting the sale of flavored tobacco products already approved and regulated by the Food & Drug Administration.

Preventing these products from falling into the wrong hands is important to us too. That is why we, as responsible business owners and stewards in our community, train our employees to ensure youth access prevention is always top of mind. Even data shows there has been reduction in youth usage of cigarette and other traditional tobacco products, we are still concerned with the status of youth vapor use which is why we believe a firm statewide approach addressing this is needed.

Senate Bill 1245 would begin regulating synthetic nicotine products similar to tobacco while implementing youth access prevention that have proven successful in other localities. This bill would add vapor use to the Arizona Smoke-Free Act. It would also require age verification for online delivery sales and ban the possession of vapor and tobacco products on school grounds. Now is the time to act. State revenue for substance abuse programs is at risk if Arizona doesn’t align to the new federal law increasing purchase age restrictions for tobacco and vapor products to 21. We welcome these changes along with other retailers to send a message to youth about the dangers of tobacco and vapor products.

It would also establish strong statewide retail licensing with uniform penalties. It makes sense for an agency to oversee these products when it already regulates goods with an age 21 restriction. We do not want to protect those who continue to violate the law. Small business owners are only asking for consistent and reliable laws and not local ordinances hindering our ability to compete with retailers just outside the city limits.

A ban on all flavored tobacco products just goes too far to be considered a reasonable approach. Sales of these products can account for nearly 34% of all in-store purchases making it an important component to our business’s ability to compete. It is our hope that state legislators and policymakers will choose common-sense approach regulating these legal products while doubling down on tackling youth access. 

Subash Thathi
Tempe

Subash Thathi is the owner of T&B Stores LLC in Tempe.