Patterns of specialty tobacco retail locations and visitor counts in the USA

Specialty tobacco retailers, including vape shops, smoke shops and cigar shops, are important sources of tobacco access, yet there is no reproducible national database documenting their locations and consumer engagement.

We develop a national database of specialty tobacco retailers in the USA by combining Google Maps business listings as of June 2024 with Advan unique visitor count data, updated to May 2024. We match approximately 20 000 businesses across both databases and observe roughly 50 million monthly visits to these locations. We then perform two cross-sectional analyses examining specialty retailer density and visits at the census tract and county levels.

We find strong clustering of all types of specialty retailers in low-income areas and fewer shops per capita in rural areas. We find that smoke and vape shop density is negatively correlated with both educational attainment and population share of racial and ethnic minorities. Cigar and smoke shops were less common in areas with high shares of young people aged 15-24. Additional businesses are positively associated with total consumer visits, with evidence of spillover effects across shop types.

This study provides the first reproducible national assessment of specialty tobacco retailer locations linked to consumer visit data, offering a new foundation for monitoring retail access and informing tobacco control policy.