07 June 2007: A tobacconist attempts to remain open until the store’s centennial as demand for his products drop.
By Isabelle Roughol
Santa Cruz Sentinel correspondent
WATSONVILLE, Calif. — Hanging on the wall in Jack’s Cigar Store is a 1970s photo of the shop’s founder, Jack Novcich, standing in the doorway of his store’s original location.
Back then, the smoking room was the only thing standing between the Democratic and Republican headquarters on Main Street.
Today, Jack’s Cigar Store still has a Main Street address: 446A Main St. But that A makes all the difference: the store now occupies what used to be its garage.
“Big businesses start in a garage and grow big,” said current owner Zarko Radich. “Mine ended up in one.”
Like other tobacconists across the nation, Radich suffers from tobacco having fallen out of the public’s favor. Rising awareness of the health dangers of tobacco means fewer people push the door of the nearly centennial store, and the business is dying its slow death.
“When I came [to the United States], you had to whisper for condoms and could yell for cigarettes,” Radich said. “Now you have to whisper for cigarettes.”
Radich has no estimates of how much business he’s lost, just a general feeling of changing times. “I used to call companies every morning and beg them for cigars,” he said. “Now they call me.”
Novcich moved to the United States from Serbia in 1906 and opened his tobacco store in Watsonville in 1914. He worked there from the early days of World War I to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Radich married Novcich’s niece and became a partner in the store when he moved to Watsonville, from Serbia too, in 1980.
Radich, 59, agreed that “there’s nothing good to say about smoking,” as a customer walked into the store with an oxygen tank strapped around his waist, as though to stress his point.
“Even when I was a heavy smoker, I never was pro-smoking. I’d never recommend it to anyone,” Radich said. “If you really want to smoke, I’ll recommend a better cigar and less poison.”
So Radich isn’t particularly bitter that none of his three sons, the last one recently out of college, will take over the business. Radich said he is bitter, however, that tobacconists seem to be the sole targets of the public’s discontent. He often jokes that he really works as a tax collector for the state of California.
In California, each pack of cigarettes is taxed 87 cents, and other tobacco products are taxed at 46.76 percent.
Since the late 1990s, a trend of tobacco tax increases, in California and nationwide, and smoking bans in many public areas have decreased the use of cigarettes, said Charles Ganigan, president of the California Association of Retail Tobacconists. But the sales of other products such as premium cigars, small cigars, hookahs and smokeless tobacco have increased modestly, he said.
“It is a challenging business for the future, and it’s one that requires the most adept business acumen in order to survive,” Ganigan said.
Tobacconists also must deal with the competition of online stores, which many consumers turn to to evade California taxes. Retailers that survive, Ganigan said, are those who can adapt the products they carry to the demands of more educated consumers.
Jack’s Cigar Store still has customers of two kinds, Radich said. There are those who want to buy cheaper tobacco, and those who, like Bob Steinberg of Aptos, say that “you don’t smoke a cigar, you have a relationship with it,” and shop in Radich’s wall-to-wall collection of Arturo Fuente, Cohiba or Avo cigars.
Radich also has modified the original business plan and makes up the losses in tobacco sales by selling sandwiches and drinks. He said he hopes to keep the store open until its centennial, in 2014, but said he doubts anyone will want to buy it when he retires.
“This little by little becomes the wrong business.”
