Contracts between Tobacco Retailers and Tobacco Companies: Impact on the Retail Environment

In this episode, we're talking about contracts between tobacco retailers and tobacco companies and their impact on the retail environment with our guest, Allie Reimold, MA.

Allie is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She studies how the private sector creates retail environments that ultimately impact chronic disease. Her current work utilizes mixed methods approaches to understand how food- and tobacco-purchasing behavior can be influenced by product availability, pricing, and promotion, particularly in the rapidly expanding dollar store market. As part of this work, Allie highlights the need for policy options and organizational programming that equitably addresses the commercial determinants of health in the retail setting.

She and her colleagues recently published a paper entitled "Tobacco company agreements with tobacco retailers for price discounts and prime placement of products and advertising: a scoping review." Join us as we talk through their findings, including what these contracts are, what they require of retailers, what they provide to them, and what the contracts' ultimate impact is on the retailers, on consumer behaviors, as well as on tobacco use and health.