NORTHAMPTON — Jim’s Variety, the convenience store at 15 West Farms Road in Florence, was fined $1,000 and faces a suspension of its tobacco sales permit after an Oct. 3 inspection uncovered flavored tobacco products hidden behind the counter.
At a Board of Health meeting on Thursday, store manager Hamid Habib admitted to multiple violations of the state law known as the Act to Modernize Tobacco Control that were discovered during an inspection earlier this month. The board considered the violations a single offense and the store’s first, even though the convenience store has a spotty history with tobacco sales.
“I knew that those items were not allowed to be sold. … I’m not contesting any charges. We take full responsibility for all these violations,” Habib told the board. “We will make sure nothing like this happens in the store. It’s a community store. We understand our role in the community.”
He said most of the products in question were expired, and they were leftover from before the flavored tobacco ban went into effect in June 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic; a variety of products with flavors including mint, wintergreen, spearmint and honey were kept in a bag, underneath the trash behind the counter, and distributed to customers who knew about them.
The products, he said, were found several weeks ago during a cleanup of the store and it was too late to return them to the manufacturer.
“We did not witness the sale of any products,” inspector Donna Bowman told the board, but that is not required to issue a violation.
A citizen had complained that the products were on-site and available. Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Merridith O’Leary said flavored tobacco products are “not allowed” in the store. After the inspection, Habib said, they were “destroyed. Thrown away in the garbage.”
Habib said he had a “big and tough meeting with the employee who was complained about.”
“Your history with tobacco is not good. … You have previous violations of selling to minors. We have it all on record,” O’Leary said, but the department is considering this incident the first violation of the 2020 law. “You’ve had plenty of chances to be a good community partner, but your record just shows something different.”
O’Leary said the department is providing even further leniency because Jim’s Variety was, in fact, cited for a previous flavored tobacco violation at a time when city health officials were overwhelmed by the COVID-19 response and they were giving merchants extra breathing room to come into compliance with the new law.
The Oct. 3 violations were offering flavored tobacco for sale, selling single cigars below the minimum price requirement, failure to post a Department of Revenue permit for the sale of cigars, failure to keep a written plan for the disposal of liquid nicotine containers and two violations of the state requirement that certain manufacturing documents be kept on-site.
Habib said he was unaware of the manufacturing documents requirement and he had already reached out to the manufacturers to ask for them. The cigar permit, he said, was at the store but not posted; individual cigars, O’Leary told the Gazette on Friday, sold for $2.11 after tax, lower than the $2.50 minimum required by local regulations.
The board voted to impose a $1,000 fine but to seek guidance from the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards about the proper length for a tobacco permit suspension. O’Leary said the department wanted to impose a seven-day suspension, but regulations could allow for anything from one to 30 days.
Habib asked for some “relief” from the proposed seven-day sales suspension, saying his store is the only one in the neighborhood.
The board will take up the matter again at a later date.
The board said it also received a complaint regarding illegal alcohol sales, but the state’s Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission is the proper authority to review it. Habib said he was unaware of such a complaint until Thursday’s meeting and the store does not have a history of selling alcohol to minors.
“I will go over it with my employees,” he said, promising increased training around age-restricted products in general.
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele @gazettenet.com.