Customers dying younger because they are buying an addicting, health-damaging product may produce some money if you are selling them the product, but if you are selling other products -- especially other expensive, long-term regular-purchase products that they will reliably come back to you for -- it can be a net loss. Perhaps CVS has decided that there's more return on customer acquisition dollars if it gets out of the cigarette business (both selling and promoting indirectly via USCC) and stops actively killing off its own reliable customer basis (and, incidentally, other people).
I don't know that that's really all that "cynical" of a spin, but its a self-interest profit motive rather than an altruistic one.
> I've heard scattered accounts that when a convenience store stops carrying cigarettes they also draw fewer problem customers, but haven't validated it.
That's quite possibly a factor, but CVS isn't just a "convenience store"; they are drugstores (that is, a key feature of their stores is the pharmacy) and they also have and are expanding in-store clinics (so they are also health-care providers.)
Customers dying younger because they are buying an addicting, health-damaging product may produce some money if you are selling them the product, but if you are selling other products -- especially other expensive, long-term regular-purchase products that they will reliably come back to you for -- it can be a net loss. Perhaps CVS has decided that there's more return on customer acquisition dollars if it gets out of the cigarette business (both selling and promoting indirectly via USCC) and stops actively killing off its own reliable customer basis (and, incidentally, other people).
I don't know that that's really all that "cynical" of a spin, but its a self-interest profit motive rather than an altruistic one.
> I've heard scattered accounts that when a convenience store stops carrying cigarettes they also draw fewer problem customers, but haven't validated it.
That's quite possibly a factor, but CVS isn't just a "convenience store"; they are drugstores (that is, a key feature of their stores is the pharmacy) and they also have and are expanding in-store clinics (so they are also health-care providers.)