Blog post of mine this afternoon, figured it worth sharing:
If you aren't a fan of my rant posts, feel free to skip this one. I'm almost shaking with frustration as I type this, so it should be a good (or bad) one.
A friend of mine commented to me the other day: "Oh, you're still smoking that e-cig? There's a store in the mall selling them, and I tried one, but it just doesn't seem to be worth it."
So, I got some coverage for my store today and headed over to the mall on my lunch break. Let me just say that I avoid this place like the plague, especially during the holiday season. I'm not a crowd person, especially when 90% of them are mindless drooling shoppers standing in my way and gawking at all the latest coolest crap that our local mall allows to set up in kiosks directly in the walkway of every corridor.j
I get there, and immediately am afraid as the big banner on this guy's kiosk proclaims "stop smoking the safe and inexpensive way"
I take a wander around the kiosk, and see that he is selling primarily what looks like a 306 kit, or possibly an 808. Ok, at least it isn't junk hardware like most. The guy runnign the kiosk comes over to me and asks me if I'm a smoker. I reply that I used to be, and pull out my eGo PT with some Tiki juice loaded in the ressurector. He gives me a nice smile and tells me that his kits are far superior to my big, bulky, inconvenient e-cig.
I go with it, and ask him to tell em about his kits. He informs me that his are made with a new battery featuring lithium technology that lasts an average smoker two to three days, and that his kit includes two batteries. If I was a pack-a-day smoker, I should only need to charge my batteries on the weekend. I feign surprise, and ask him how big the batteries are, and what their voltage and Mah rating are. Perhaps I have missed a 2600mah small auto battery somewhere hiding on the internet.
He has no clue. Doesn't know the voltage, doesn't know the capacity, just knows that they are lithium and last 2-3 days.
OK. Fine. The finer points of mah rating, discharge, atty/carto resistance, etc. could be beyond a simple salesman. Not everyone does research into larger batts, puff counts, runtimes, etc etc.
So I ask him if his unit is a 2-pc or 3-pc, trying to determine if it's a 306 or a KR808. He tells me it's just one piece, and a charger. So I reiterate and ask specifically if there is a separate atomizer and cartridge, or a single all-in-one unit and show him what I mean with my ressurector.
He tells me that these uswe a groundbreaking technology with a vapor coil (atomizer I guess) that doesn't need to be replaced, and just uses refilled cartridges. He takes his apart and shows me a recessed atomizer and a cartridge with filler that sits half in the atty, half in the cart. It falls out in his hand and gets nic everywhere, and he says they are not meant to be taken apart. I ask him how you refill it if it isn't meant to be taken apart. he states that you just drip juice into the mouthpiece hole.
OK.
So I ask him about the juice he carries (actual refill bottles, I was impressed he wasn't trying to sell me the prefilled replacements at the $15 per box). He states that their bottle (labeled 15ml, though he didn't know how much in mL was in there) will last "a few months." I ask him how much you are supposed to use to refill, and he tells me to use four drops in that tiny little mouthpiece hole, as they aren't supposed to be taken apart, and that will be the equivalent of two packs of smokes. He said each bottle contains about 300 drops, so it's equivalent to 150 packs of cigarettes. Imagine the savings!
I ask him what strength the juice is, and he replies that he sells high, medium, and low. High has as much nic as full flavors, medium lights, and low ultra lights. Upon asking him if his juices were PG or VG, he replied that they were just water, flavor, and nic. No other chemicals and completely safe.
I tried several times to educate him (nicely each time) that some of the claims he was making were silly. I used basic science to explain some of this (Really, how much vapor can come from a single drop of liquid? How long do you think a battery this size should last if a physically larger one lasts about 8 hours?) and he got upset, and evetually just asked me to leave and went back to his iPad.
This folks, is what is wrong with our industry, and why we struggle daily fighting antis and critics. Imagine you are a smoker. You know nothing about e-cigs. You run into this guy and pick up a starter kit ($150 to $200 btw... online pricing here) and a jug of juice ($30 per 15ml). You expect your $200 investment to last at least three months, per what the guy at the kiosk told you. Two weeks later, you're out of juice. Every few hours, your batteries are dying. You can't stay away from the analogs because you never know when this POS thing will work and when it won't.
You go back to the mall and claim your 'lifetime warranty' that they advertise. They swap you out with a new unit, put a fresh $2 pack of cartridges in your old box, and back on the shelf it goes.
Whaddya know, the new kit fails miserably as well. You get frustrated, toss the thing in a drawer, and light up a Marb. The next time anyone says anything about e-cigs, yout ell them just what a piece of .... these things are. Never again will you look at these damn things, and you will die early from sucking on tobacco sticks.
Vendors need to be realistic, educated, and make claims that they can back up. Don't get me wrong, this guy put on a great sales pitch for someone uneducated about our industry. I watched him sell three kits (at a $100+profit) while I waited for my wife to come back from the lady selling nail crap. The guy makes decent money doing it. But, how many people does he ruin to this entire industry? This is the ....er that the FDA should be shutting down for making insane claims, not legitimate, informative, and responsible vendors.
Makes me want to rent a kiosk down from him and buy a load of Volts or G6's to sell to people who actually want to kick the cancer sticks...
If you aren't a fan of my rant posts, feel free to skip this one. I'm almost shaking with frustration as I type this, so it should be a good (or bad) one.
A friend of mine commented to me the other day: "Oh, you're still smoking that e-cig? There's a store in the mall selling them, and I tried one, but it just doesn't seem to be worth it."
So, I got some coverage for my store today and headed over to the mall on my lunch break. Let me just say that I avoid this place like the plague, especially during the holiday season. I'm not a crowd person, especially when 90% of them are mindless drooling shoppers standing in my way and gawking at all the latest coolest crap that our local mall allows to set up in kiosks directly in the walkway of every corridor.j
I get there, and immediately am afraid as the big banner on this guy's kiosk proclaims "stop smoking the safe and inexpensive way"
I take a wander around the kiosk, and see that he is selling primarily what looks like a 306 kit, or possibly an 808. Ok, at least it isn't junk hardware like most. The guy runnign the kiosk comes over to me and asks me if I'm a smoker. I reply that I used to be, and pull out my eGo PT with some Tiki juice loaded in the ressurector. He gives me a nice smile and tells me that his kits are far superior to my big, bulky, inconvenient e-cig.
I go with it, and ask him to tell em about his kits. He informs me that his are made with a new battery featuring lithium technology that lasts an average smoker two to three days, and that his kit includes two batteries. If I was a pack-a-day smoker, I should only need to charge my batteries on the weekend. I feign surprise, and ask him how big the batteries are, and what their voltage and Mah rating are. Perhaps I have missed a 2600mah small auto battery somewhere hiding on the internet.
He has no clue. Doesn't know the voltage, doesn't know the capacity, just knows that they are lithium and last 2-3 days.
OK. Fine. The finer points of mah rating, discharge, atty/carto resistance, etc. could be beyond a simple salesman. Not everyone does research into larger batts, puff counts, runtimes, etc etc.
So I ask him if his unit is a 2-pc or 3-pc, trying to determine if it's a 306 or a KR808. He tells me it's just one piece, and a charger. So I reiterate and ask specifically if there is a separate atomizer and cartridge, or a single all-in-one unit and show him what I mean with my ressurector.
He tells me that these uswe a groundbreaking technology with a vapor coil (atomizer I guess) that doesn't need to be replaced, and just uses refilled cartridges. He takes his apart and shows me a recessed atomizer and a cartridge with filler that sits half in the atty, half in the cart. It falls out in his hand and gets nic everywhere, and he says they are not meant to be taken apart. I ask him how you refill it if it isn't meant to be taken apart. he states that you just drip juice into the mouthpiece hole.
OK.
So I ask him about the juice he carries (actual refill bottles, I was impressed he wasn't trying to sell me the prefilled replacements at the $15 per box). He states that their bottle (labeled 15ml, though he didn't know how much in mL was in there) will last "a few months." I ask him how much you are supposed to use to refill, and he tells me to use four drops in that tiny little mouthpiece hole, as they aren't supposed to be taken apart, and that will be the equivalent of two packs of smokes. He said each bottle contains about 300 drops, so it's equivalent to 150 packs of cigarettes. Imagine the savings!
I ask him what strength the juice is, and he replies that he sells high, medium, and low. High has as much nic as full flavors, medium lights, and low ultra lights. Upon asking him if his juices were PG or VG, he replied that they were just water, flavor, and nic. No other chemicals and completely safe.
I tried several times to educate him (nicely each time) that some of the claims he was making were silly. I used basic science to explain some of this (Really, how much vapor can come from a single drop of liquid? How long do you think a battery this size should last if a physically larger one lasts about 8 hours?) and he got upset, and evetually just asked me to leave and went back to his iPad.
This folks, is what is wrong with our industry, and why we struggle daily fighting antis and critics. Imagine you are a smoker. You know nothing about e-cigs. You run into this guy and pick up a starter kit ($150 to $200 btw... online pricing here) and a jug of juice ($30 per 15ml). You expect your $200 investment to last at least three months, per what the guy at the kiosk told you. Two weeks later, you're out of juice. Every few hours, your batteries are dying. You can't stay away from the analogs because you never know when this POS thing will work and when it won't.
You go back to the mall and claim your 'lifetime warranty' that they advertise. They swap you out with a new unit, put a fresh $2 pack of cartridges in your old box, and back on the shelf it goes.
Whaddya know, the new kit fails miserably as well. You get frustrated, toss the thing in a drawer, and light up a Marb. The next time anyone says anything about e-cigs, yout ell them just what a piece of .... these things are. Never again will you look at these damn things, and you will die early from sucking on tobacco sticks.
Vendors need to be realistic, educated, and make claims that they can back up. Don't get me wrong, this guy put on a great sales pitch for someone uneducated about our industry. I watched him sell three kits (at a $100+profit) while I waited for my wife to come back from the lady selling nail crap. The guy makes decent money doing it. But, how many people does he ruin to this entire industry? This is the ....er that the FDA should be shutting down for making insane claims, not legitimate, informative, and responsible vendors.
Makes me want to rent a kiosk down from him and buy a load of Volts or G6's to sell to people who actually want to kick the cancer sticks...
