BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – Back in January, a ban was placed, strictly prohibiting the sale of certain vape products, but a lawsuit was filed shortly after and the ban was temporarily lifted. Now starting Monday, the ban will be put back in place and will be strictly enforced by the ATC.
Abrielle Peno, manager of X Vape Smoke Shop, has seen this story play out once before, and it was not in their favor. Back in January after the first vape ban, the second location of X Vape was left with empty shelves and no choice but to close.
“Yeah, my boss was like, if we don’t get the sales up, if we don’t pull any of it up, then we’re going to have to trash this place” said Peno.
Vapes are not the only products sold by these stores, but still bring in a substantial amount of their revenue.
Now with the second vape ban starting Monday, they are worried they may have to make another big decision soon.
“We’re questioning if we’re going to sell it, because there’s not going to be much left of this if there’s no vapes,” added Peno.
Peno says they have slashed prices in half to salvage whatever profit they can before Monday. They expect to lose as much as six-thousand dollars on items they just bought.
They also worry about the customers of vape shops, saying this will do more harm than good.
“She just transferred to vaping to stop smoking cigarettes, and now that they are stopping vaping, she has to go back to smoking cigarettes,” explained Peno, “it’s gotten to the point where people come in here and being like what can i do to smoke and not smoke cigarettes, I’m just like…get a ZYN pack i don’t know”
She says that they won’t have to remove every vape from the shelves.
“And the crazy part is that we won’t have to take everything down, but there’s certain brands that we can keep up, and the certain brands we can keep up are owned by like Marlboro and by Camel, and those big tobacco companies” added Peno.
A trial date has been set for some time in April.
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