September is National We Card Month, a national awareness month encouraging retailers to ramp up and renew their training and compliance efforts while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is stepping up enforcement activities around underage tobacco sales.
We Card is providing retailers with several key steps to ensure they can comply with state and federal regulations, including:
- Making certain new hires are fully trained while providing re-training to veteran staff using comprehensive e-learning training, either store-developed or offered through We Card. Courses should cover FDA requirements of retailers and state law requirements along with role-playing.
- Refreshing training materials and in-store signage to ensure both the store and employees have the latest tools and information to prevent the underage sale of tobacco and vapor products.
- Measuring the performance of both employees and store performance through mystery shopping checks to confirm employees are properly carding or scanning IDs as required by store management.
- Double checking overall store practices against We Card’s Guide to Best Practices.
Advocating for We Card’s new campaign to raise awareness of the underage access problem of “social sourcing,” which allows underage youth to access tobacco and vaping products through gifting, proxy purchase by another or the transfer of products from one to another.
We Card is a national nonprofit organization that represents a unified coalition of trade associations, retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers to support retailers of tobacco and other age-restricted products. Retailers use We Card’s educational and training services to comply with federal and state laws while working to prevent underage tobacco, e-vapor, and other age-restricted product sales.
To access education and resources, visit: wecard.org
