New shop offers smoking alternative

Soon-to-be Arkansas City resident Cindi Campbell visited Juicy's Vapor Lounge early Monday afternoon to introduce herself to the new shop's owner.
"I'm so glad you're here," said Campbell, of Sand Springs, Okla. "I'm moving here next week and thought I'd have to stock up (on e-cigarette products) down there."

She addressed Juicy's Vapor Lounge LLC co-owner and Ark City store manager Michael Yeager, who opened the local shop about a month ago in a strip mall in the 1000 block of North Summit Street, next to Ionic Salon.

Campbell said she no longer has to worry about stocking up on e-cigarettes since she discovered Juicy's as she was driving down Summit Street on Monday.

E-cigarettes appear to be receiving a lot of attention in Ark City, as they have been throughout the country in recent years. Cigaronne cigarettes.

The devices — referred to by Yeager as e-juice vaporizers — are shifting from being a fad to being a mainstream way to kick the smoking habit, The Winston-Salem Journal reported earlier this year.

They deliver smaller amounts of nicotine than cigarettes, along with vaporized juices that can be purchased in various flavors.

And the e-cigarettes don't contain many other harsh chemical ingredients, in addition to nicotine, that are in cigarettes, Yeager said.

"Chemical-wise, cigarettes have over 4,000 chemicals, but the ingredients (delivered in) our inhalers are propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, food flavoring and nicotine," he said.

"We mix our juices with from zero milligrams of nicotine to 6, 12, 18 or 24 milligrams of nicotine."

Sales of e-cigarettes are expected to surpass $1 billion this year and analysts at Wells Fargo predict sales will top $10 billion in five years, according to The Daily Ticker, the finance blog of Yahoo.com, in a posting last week.

The battery-operated devices are atomizers consisting of a base; tiny heating coil wrapped around wicks that soak up e-juice, then vaporize it; metal ring; glass tube; seal ring; and clip tip used as a mouthpiece when "vaping."

Users of e-cigarettes do not refer to themselves as smokers, as a slogan in the new Ark City shop indicates:

"Stop smoking, start vaping."

Juicy's co-owners Yeager, of Lamont, Okla., and Zac Kirby, of Stillwater, Okla., decided recently to be a part of the growing e-cigarette market.

"It's a humongous industry just now starting to set in," Yeager said.

In July, the two men started the first of seven shops in Kansas and Oklahoma, Yeager said.

In Oklahoma, stores have been opened in several cities, including Clinton, Enid, Ponca City (two shops), Stillwater and Weatherford.

The Juicy's in Ark City is the most recent to open and is their only Kansas store, he said.

Yeager and his assistant manager, Kelsey Keyworth, have been busy since the shop opened.

They have waited on many customers and potential customers — recent non-smokers, usually — by answering questions about the technology of e-cigarettes.

They also sell product components including "tanks" — small tubes — of juices mixed with nicotine, batteries, coils and wicks.

The Ark City shop has a comfortable seating area with a TV across the room from the shop's sales counter and product shelves.

On a low table, surrounded by chairs and couches, are dozens of small tanks, or tubes, of different e-juice flavors.

It is called the "tester table" and potential customers can try out as many flavors as they want before deciding on a purchase, Yeager said.

The shop offers 70 e-juice flavors in all, including various fruit and dessert flavors such as blackberry, blueberry, cherry limeade, sour grape, orange cream, apple pie, and banana pudding; a few drink flavors, including rum and coke; and 10 cigarette flavors, including Marlboro, Cowboy Menthol and Midnight Toke.

Yeager said he doesn't like the term e-cigarette because it implies a product that is disposable.

But the battery-operated devices offered at Juicy's can last for months, or "as long as you take care of them."

"This is probably the best product on the market, by far, to stop smoking," said Yeager, himself a former smoker who became sold on e-cigarettes after his business partner gave him one to try.

"It seemed to me one of the products that takes care of nicotine craving and the habit of smoking or having to have something in your hand," he said.