Stumbling from flavors to tackle

Unique Broad Channel retailer tries to overcome vaping regulation

by Max Parrott / Associate Editor, Queens Chronicle

A cloud hangs over Broad Channel’s sole bait shop, but not the flavored variety of vapor that emanated from its doors in the good times.

Vape, Bait & Tackle, formerly known as Vape Stop, has been struggling to find its footing ever since Mayor de Blasio signed into law a bill that banned the retail sale of flavored e-cigarette products in New York City starting last July. Gov. Cuomo signed a corresponding statewide ban that went into effect in July 2020.

“Our wonderful governor decided to kill my business. So I had no choice just to bring in something else,” said owner Leon Gindel.

Gindel knew that his model would take a big hit as soon as the flavor ban went into effect. Since the majority of his vape clients were boarders and fishermen, he figured he would try to pivot to a model that would kill two birds with one stone, and sling some bait and fishing equipment next to his vape stock of e-liquids, mods and atomizers.

But the idea is easier said than done. Vapes basically sold themselves, according to Gindel. The bait game is not the same story.

“I’m a new guy. It’s hard to get bait on time. On top of that because of the coronavirus, the wholesaler is like 80 percent empty on their stock, so it’s impossible to get hardware,” Gindel said.

He said that two bait shops in Howard Beach have a solid hold on the area’s customer base, and don’t want any new competition.

“They have more customers, more traffic, they buy more [bait],” Gindel said.

Gindel thinks area’s bait wholesaler has been coordinating with the other two shops to leave him in the lurch. That day he was told that the wholesaler had run out of worms, so he had to travel up to his competition, who seemed to have fresh stock, to buy them at retail price.

“Everybody got the bait except me,” Gindel said.

It’s been a year since the city’s flavor ban, and Gindel is still sore about it. The burgeoning network of vape startups and wholesalers that exploded in number several years ago was so accessible to retailers, he said.

“When I was opening a vape shop, wholesalers would give me free stuff, posters. They tried to help me,” Gindel said.

Though the number of youth using e-cigarettes, primarily the Juul brand, had surged to over 5 million, with nearly 1 million youth using the product daily as of 2019, Gindel argued, as many in the industry did, that vapes were fundamentally a smoking cessation tool that “saves lives.”

He believed in his business, though he knows that the political reality is not likely to change any time soon.

“There’s no turning back,” he said.