FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- As the Massachusetts House considers a bill that would increase the state’s minimum tobacco purchase age from 18 to 21, Cumberland Farms has requested that state representatives enact “clear and unambiguous” tobacco regulations, reports the Taunton Daily Gazette. More than 1,000 managers and store managers signed a letter delivered to the House lawmakers, stating store-level employees want their compliance efforts to be “second nature.”
“But as it stands now, we are instead forced to juggle hundreds of different and constantly-changing local requirements related to pricing, packaging, signage, product bans, licensing display methods, age verification procedure, employee training, recordkeeping, disposal plans and more,” the letter read.
Cumberland Farms did not take a position on the 21 bill, which also would ban tobacco sales at pharmacies and enact additional regulations for electronic cigarettes. Instead, the retailer noted the current version of the bill would not prevent cities and towns from raising the minimum purchase age beyond 21 (currently, more than 100 of the Massachusetts’s 351 municipalities already have raised their tobacco age to 21).
The bill, company executives wrote in an additional letter, “would provide no meaningful relief” to the “increasingly chaotic patchwork of municipal regulations.”
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