There are way more smoke and vape shops than there used to be. Has the government crackdown had any effect?

If you live in a major city in Australia, you have probably noticed there are a lot more tobacconists around than there used to be. Every week it seems like a new shop has popped up, sometimes in an unlikely spot.

Yet the smoking rate has been in constant decline, now sitting at 8.3%.

So what’s going on: are there actually more smoke shops? How many? Is this due to the skyrocketing rates of vaping? And how has the government’s crackdown on vape imports affected things, if at all?

Answering these questions is tricky due a lack of official data. There doesn’t appear to be a national register of tobacconists or vape retailers, and each state has different rules about whether tobacconists or vape retailers need to register.

To get an indication of the trends, Asic’s business register is used here as a proxy, identifying keywords in business names that relate to smoking, tobacco and vaping, and names of prominent tobacconist chains. Obviously this won’t capture all retailers, but it should give an indication of how things compare from one year to the next.

Click here for an accessible version of the chart.

So yes, there are definitely more smoke shops around now than there used to be. The total number of smoking or vaping-related business names increased from 1,086 in 2016 to 1,467 in 2024 – about a 35% jump. A big part of this was vaping-related businesses – these more than doubled from 150 to 360.

The second part of the chart suggests the government’s vaping crackdown is actually having an impact. New business registrations with vaping-related keywords in the name were lower in 2024 than for any other year. These figures only count registrations from January to September to make the partial 2024 data comparable with other years. There are some caveats with the numbers in more recent years, which you can read in notes on methods below.

Related: Surge in NSW vape retailers as more than 600 stores join trade before federal crackdown

One possible (unsubstantiated) theory for the surge in tobacconists is demand for black market tobacco is rising due to the ever increasing cost of legal tobacco (see the constant price rises in our CPI explorer – we had to add a special toggle because tobacco price rises eclipse everything else).

This idea is clearly harder to measure in a quantitative way, but Victorian police have previously told the media they suspect that “a large portion of the tobacco industry has been infiltrated by serious and organised crime”.

The ATO also provides figures on illicit tobacco seizures, which shows 2023-24 was a record year in some ways, but not others. It had the highest number of tobacco seizures in total, with the highest number of cigarette sticks seized, but the total amount by weight and estimated excise duty was lower than other years. However, keep in mind these numbers can’t tell us a complete picture about illicit tobacco consumption as authorities may be putting in more effort and resources into disrupting the black market.

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Notes

For this analysis, Asic’s business names dataset was used, combining 2024 with previous versions in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2022.

The business names dataset has every business name and their registration date at each point in time. Businesses that are deregistered remain in the data for 12 months and are then removed.

There may be some small gaps in the dataset in the years 2020, 2021 and 2023 because of this. However, the point in time comparisons between 2016 and 2024 are unaffected by this issue.

Regular expressions were used to check for keywords in business names, and names were grouped into the categories: any smoking (includes vape and tobacco), vape only, smoking but not vape.

The keyword list included the following terms: smokes, smoking accessories, tobacco*, vape, vapes, vaping, cigar, as well as the names of known tobacconist chains.

The 2016 to 2024 comparison compares all businesses in the dataset in the categories outlined above. The comparison of new business names in each year uses the registration date, and only uses those registered between January and September.

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