Reports released over the last few months have claimed that the sales of e-cigarettes have been declining. Everywhere from Yahoo! News to the Wall Street Journal, similar headlines have been thrown around, talking about the decline in growth in the market. Over the next few minutes, we are going to figure out exactly what they are all talking about, and more importantly look at the ramifications to our community.
Don’t Worry, They’re Talking About Cig-A-Likes
As niche vapers, we tend to forget that the majority of the time, when the financial press talk about vaping, they are not thinking about us. They are looking at the mainstream market owned by Big Tobacco companies with products that are sold in every convenience store around the land. Our 200-watt devices are not considered the norm by pundits who watch the sales of stocks and judge an industry by those standards. They are the people who encourage the public to buy into companies for an increase in personal wealth, and the reality of the situation is, if you look at the public markets based on the offerings of Big Tobacco, vaping is not a profitable industry.
If they looked beyond the sales sheets of these corporations to the actual industry that has them running scared, pulling every dirty trick in the book to squash the competition, these pundits would be able to see that the vaping industry is on the rise. The sad truth for the cig-a-like market is fewer people are willing to use them after they discover actual vaping devices.
The drop in sales can also be attributed to the Public Health machine industry constantly putting out misinformation about product safety and health risks associated with the use of these products, although the vast majority of these claims are baseless or cherry picked from immensely biased and poorly conducted studies. Many in the general public have come to believe that continuing to smoke tobacco cigarettes will be less harmful to their health.
Another reason for the decline in the sale is the fresh and innovative technology that these companies are using to shore up their product base, which as it happens is several years out of date. If they would have moved forward with the rest of the industry, rather than relying on non-refillable cartomizers and batteries that last for a couple of hours at most, their sales might not have dropped so quickly. As bigger, better and less costly technology has come onto the market via internet sales and specialty vape shops, the convenience stores have been left with a bunch of outdated stock that few people want, and the giants have been left with customers (those retail outlets) who want no part in picking up future innovations because they simply don’t have the space.
Those Pesky Independent Vape Companies
The main reason the sales are declining for the poor cig-a-likes is the innovation and forward thinking of thousands of small to medium-sized companies who spend every day looking for the next avenue for the industry to follow. Whether it is a new e-liquid, that unlike its Big Corporate brother, can be purchased knowing the exact nicotine content. The maximum amount of nicotine most people ever want is 24 milligrams per millilitre (mg/ml), which they can lower over time and the over the counter from the convenience store is around 48 mg/ml, period. Many vapers are looking to wean themselves off nicotine, and the products they are being offered from the Big 5 doesn’t give them that option.
The list of reasons for people who vape moving away from the cig-a-likes is endless, but the plain and simple truth is, with so many other products on the market that are more affordable and work infinitely better, why would they settle for the inferior product.
Time For The Sour Note
With all of the reasons we have just put forward as to why the sales of cig-a-likes have been on the decline, they are about to get a massive boost in sales. When the FDA’s deeming regulations are finalized and put into place, all of the advancement in technology, all of the innovations, the ideas and years of work that have been put into creating affordable, usable devices, are basically going to be thrown into the trash; stifling an entire industry because its products did not exist on some random date in 2007. This will kill 99% of the companies, remove the products from future sales unless they can pay Uncle Sam’s price tag of possibly being allowed to do business in the future. The only companies that will be able to afford the rights to carry on are the very people who these vapers were trying to get away from in the first place.
Didn’t that bill that would enact the 2007 date get defeated? Just recently I read that. They’re supposedly using the date the FDA makes their deeming regulation as the new grandfather date.
Evan, as it stands the 2007 predicate date is still in effect. Anything “deemed a tobacco product” brought onto the market after that date is subject to onerous regulation and unfortunately the FDA believes that the vaping market falls into that category. We recently had an amendment come through committee that would move the date to the day that the FDA regulations come into place, but until such a time as it passes the house and senate the market can be crushed overnight.
…and WILL be crushed overnight because the house and senate are in the pockets of Big Tobacco.