Roger Moroney After an eight-month battle of will, Napier woman Dianne Stevens is finally set to kick the smoking habit. In fact, the Greenmeadows dairy owner is so determined to win the fight this time, she's kicked tobacco right out of her shop. And, it seems, she's also determined that she will neveragain be responsible for putting young people on the smelly, unhealthy road to nicotine addiction. "I'm more than happy to kick it this time because it's a filthy habit," she said, after pointing out that the tobacco cabinet in the Greenmeadows Dairy was getting emptier by the day. Normally full, there are only about 300 packets of cigarettes and a couple of packets of loose tobacco left. By the weekend, she reckons, they will be gone. And they won't be replaced by new stock. She has stopped ordering all tobacco lines and is going to replace them with more food and drink products. "It's not an image we want to portray," she said. Her main concern, apart from the health angle, was that large numbers of young schoolchildren came into her shop after school, and she did not want to expose them to the sight of tobacco products. "It will be a bit of a slug in the profits - we turned over $100,000 worth of cigarettes last year, but then they don't have a very big profit margin. The Government gets the real profit, not us." She has run the dairy for about three-and-a-half years and been thinking about dumping tobacco from the shelves for some time, only recently making the decision not to re-order dwindling stocks. Reaction has been mainly positive, with many people saying "good on you." One woman, however, remarked "that's bloody stupid" although Mrs Stevens stuck to her guns and simply said it was not an image she wanted to portray and that was that. "They will end up being sold only in service stations, liquor stores and supermarkets ... places like that," she predicted. With profit margins for retailers so tight she said small business owners could make up losses in profit through other sale areas. Her shop will soon be a tobacco-free zone, and with new-found determination, so will she.
