As the Westminster, Massachusetts, Board of Health considers a ban on sales of all tobacco products in the town, many residents are in an uproar over an issue they call the personal freedom to use a legal product -- and business owners are worried about their bottom line.
"The impact is going to be on the businesses. It's not going to be on the smokers," Marissa Fratturelli, a manager of Westminster Liquors, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon.
She ran the numbers and found that 14 percent of her customers buy cigarettes, but each cigarette customer also buys, on average, $23 worth of beer, wine or liquor. "It's not just the sales of cigarettes. It's what else people are buying. That'll be the biggest impact on businesses in this town."
Lyssa Boudreau of the Depot General Store in Westminster had the same concerns.
"Us as retailers don't think about just the sale of cigarettes. We think about the big picture, which is people coming in for other things, and they're not going to stop here if they can't get their cigarettes," she said.
Board of Health members and staff did not respond to requests for comment but have said in the past their concern is with protecting people's health and discouraging young people from taking up the habit of smoking. And they do have supporters in the town, like Paul "Woody" Woodard, who lost both his parents to smoking-related illness and himself gave up Marlboros 38 years ago.
"I don't want to see anybody get hurt business-wise, but what I do want is to let people know that tobacco is not the right choice to make. It kills you. It gives you cancer," Woodard said.
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Business owners say if people want to make cigarettes, snuff, cigars, and chewing tobacco illegal, they should push for a statewide or national ban. Just the town of Westminster doing it will single them out for hardship, they argue.
"They're forcing people to go to other towns where they're buying products that they should be buying here," Fratturelli said.
With videographer Daniel J. Ferrigan
