Leader-Herald |
In the middle of the afternoon on the first day of the year, Brian Puffer was dispatched from home to get a pack of menthol Marlboro Light 100’s. He didn’t have to go far.
“I live upstairs in the building to the left,” Puffer said while standing inside Duke Zone, a tobacco and smoking accessories store at 22 N. Main St. When he received the change from the $20 bill he had handed to a man behind the counter, Puffer stuffed it into a tip jar.
“I don’t smoke,” Puffer said. “My wife does. So when I come down to get cigarettes, it’s for her.”
He said goodbye to the attendant and predicted he would see him again in a day or two.
The man behind the counter, Wareth Ali, is the store’s manager.
“That right there was just a little example of what goes on here all day,” Ali said when Puffer was outside and walking along the snowy sidewalk. “Cigarette sales are pretty much a given here in this shop.”
The manager lives in Amsterdam. He has plenty of experience working in retail, he said, and has helped to staff many small neighborhood stores. But this was his first time on the clock in a smoke shop.
Early last summer, shortly after Duke Zone’s grand opening, Ali stopped in to see if there was any help wanted. It was during one his frequent trips with friends to Great Sacandaga Lake.
Ali said he contacted the store’s owner, a man living in Los Angeles County, California, and was hired to run the place. It is open every day, 82 hours per week.
The staff consists of Ali and a part-time employee, and the manager estimated he works about 90 percent of the available hours.
“I enjoy it,” Ali said. “It’s a fairly easy job. It doesn’t require too much stress. Most of the time, somebody walks in, I’ll help them out and then go in back and sit down.”
A sign on the front door warns intruders that the property is guarded by a feline — an “attack cat.”
Ali pushed a makeshift barrier aside and disappeared into a room behind the sales counter. The barrier was a promotional blanket distributed by a cigar company and it now served as a privacy curtain. He returned holding a large gray-and-white cat. This was Smokey.
“He’s my cat but he’s pretty much the face of the store,” Ali said. He brings the cat from Amsterdam, and since the manager works nearly every day in Duke Zone, the cat spends most of its days at 22 N. Main St.
Smokey, very soft to the touch, seemed to enjoy the attention he received from the store’s entrants.
“He’s like a dog in disguise, pretty much,” Ali said about his workplace companion. “If you throw him a ball, he’s playing fetch with you, which is very interesting.”
Cigarettes, like the pack of menthols that Puffer had fetched for his wife, are the top sellers in the store, according to Ali. There is a not a lot of profit in them, he explained, but they do bring the most foot traffic to the shop — which also sells bongs and pipes for toking cannabis.
“A lot of cannabis smokers will typically come here,” Ali said. “We have the glass, and we have the products for cleaning them.”
Duke Zone does carry hemp and CBD items which lack the amounts of the THC compound found in cannabis but is not licensed to sell cannabis. Tobacco is the store’s focus.
After tobacco purchases, which include cigars, the next largest contributor of revenues is from sales of wraps — or the papers used for the self-manufacture of tobacco........