ShopKo Banishing Tobacco Products

Discount retailer ShopKo Stores said Tuesday that it will no longer sell tobacco products in its 130 department stores.

Terry McDonald, a senior vice president at ShopKo, which operates stores in 15 states from Wisconsin to Oregon, cited a steady decline in cigarette sales, which account for less than 1% of the chain’s revenue.

ShopKo, which has no stores in California, becomes the second mass retailer to banish tobacco from its shelves. Its bigger competitor, Target, which operates more than 700 stores, announced last year it was going tobacco-free.

“It’s not a real big issue,” Mark Smith, a spokesman for cigarette maker Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., said of the ShopKo announcement. “The 25% of all adults who happen to smoke . . . will gladly shop elsewhere.”

McDonald said Green Bay, Wis.-based ShopKo had been phasing out tobacco, but delayed an announcement until it was gone from all of its stores. He said the chain began experimenting in 1994 with a ban in its stores in Utah, where the population of Mormons is large and smoking rates are low.

It “worked out pretty successfully for us, and we had great kudos from the public about it,” McDonald said.

Company executives initially worried that “there would be a pro-smoking group who would run up to us and say: ‘Wait a minute. You’re not convenient . . . anymore,’ ” but that didn’t happen, McDonald said.

In fact, there was “no reaction from smokers, and the reaction has been very favorable from nonsmokers,” he said.

Kurt Barnard, a retail economist in Scotch Plains, N.J., said the growing stigma attached to smoking contributed to the moves by ShopKo and Target.

This is “merchandise that is not necessarily the kind they would want to be known for selling,” Barnard said. “They are saying, ‘We agree with all those people . . . who say smoking is bad. If you insist on having this, go to someone else.’ ”

Martin Feldman, a tobacco analyst with Smith Barney & Co., said tobacco contributed so little to ShopKo’s revenue that it was not worth the potential embarrassment should sales inadvertently be made to underage youths.

But “the more stores that cut the sales of cigarettes, the more valuable it is for the remaining stores,” Feldman said.