Smokefree enforcement officers took swift action against a Hutt Valley vape store operating inside a toy shop this week.
To enter the AAA Vape Store, customers had to walk through aisles of children’s toys, then through a glass door with an R18 sign on it. Inside the vape store, more toys were stacked high against the windows.
The grassroots group fighting against youth vaping, Vape Free Kids, alerted 1News to the store. Its co-founder, Charyl Robinson, said vapes should not be anywhere near kids’ toys and that the situation was “outrageous”.
“The two things should be as far away as possible,” Robinson said this week.
However, the issue was that customers in the toy store could see vape products through the glass door.
“On the one hand, you’ve got an R18 sign on the glass door that you can see right through, and on the other, he’s got baby toys right next to the products,” Robinson said.
“You tell me, is a child going to be enticed in there, or are they going to read the R18 sign and say ‘oh I can’t go in there?”
When Associate Health Minister Casey Costello was shown footage of the store this week, she agreed with Vape Free Kids that the situation was outrageous.
“It’s really disappointing, it’s not at all what the expectation is, I mean, the fact that you’re walking through a toy store is unacceptable,” Costello said.
Costello felt the shop was in breach of rules that came into force last month, designed to make vape stores ‘go dark’ and ensure vaping products were kept out of the sight of young people.
She said it was inappropriate that shoppers could see vapes in the shop from within the toy store.
Earlier this week, the store owner told 1News that he had recently made changes to his shop to ensure that vaping products were no longer visible to pedestrians outside his store, and he believed he was complying with all the new rules.
On Friday, he said he immediately covered the glass door in his shop after being visited by smokefree enforcement officers and that vapes could no longer be seen from the toy store.
