Stop Buying Vapes from Gas Stations: Go to Your Local Vape Shop Instead

If you started vaping recently, there’s a good chance that you got your first vape from a gas station because that’s where you bought your cigarettes.

17:24 10 November 2022

In recent years, the popularity of disposable vapes has allowed retailers who previously weren’t very involved in the vaping industry – gas stations and convenience stores, for instance – to get much more involved than they were in the past. Traditional refillable vaping devices require ancillary products like replacement coils and bottled e-liquids, and those ancillary products require much more shelf space than a typical gas station has. Disposable vapes, on the other hand, are easy to sell because they require little space – so gas stations have latched on to that trend in a big way.

If you started vaping recently, there’s a good chance that you got your first vape from a gas station because that’s where you bought your cigarettes. There’s an equally good chance that you continue to buy vapes from a local gas station because it’s convenient. Disposable vapes are so popular and so readily available as gas stations and convenience stores, in fact, that you may have never stepped into a specialty store like Virginia Beach vape shop Vapor Chasers and have no intention of ever doing so.

If you want to have the best possible vaping experience, buying from a gas station definitely isn’t the best way to do it. Although it might seem like vape shops don’t have anything different to offer for those who prefer the disposable experience, that’s actually not the case at all. Reading this article, you’re going to learn why.

Why Shouldn’t You Buy Vapes from a Gas Station?

We’ll start by looking at what it’s like to buy vapes from a gas station. Here’s why that’s not ideal if you want to have the best possible experience.

Big Tobacco Buys Shelf Space at Gas Stations

The selection of vaping products at gas stations is usually quite limited. That’s by design because Big Tobacco companies pay for the most prominent shelf space – and there’s only so much room to go around. Most of the vaping products that you see in a gas station will be brands owned by Big Tobacco, and those brands frankly aren’t very good. There’s not going to be a lot of room left over for disposable vapes, and your selection will suffer as a result. Buying vapes from a gas station often means that you’re still handing your money over to Big Tobacco, just as you did when you were a smoker. Is that really what you want to do?

Fake Disposable Vapes Are Surprisingly Common

Did you know that are millions of fake disposable vapes on the market today? Manufacturing a disposable vape is not a particularly difficult thing for a factory to do, and a disposable vape is a small and light product that’s easy to ship in bulk. The most popular brands of disposable vapes are frequently counterfeited, and those products largely end up being sold at convenience stores and gas stations. That’s because gas stations generally don’t work with the distributors of the vaping industry – they get their disposable vapes from the same distributors that help them fill their shelves with other cheap electronic items like charging cables and memory cards.

Gas Station Employees Can’t Answer Your Vaping Questions

What should you do if you buy a disposable vape, and it starts blinking or doesn’t charge? What if you decide one day that you’d like to switch from disposable devices to something that’s refillable? You’re surely going to have questions during your journey as a vaper, and you’re not going to find answers at your local gas station because the attendants are only there to stock the shelves and collect payments. 

Why Should You Buy Vapes from a Vape Shop?

At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of why buying vapes from a gas station is never ideal. Now, let’s look at the issue from the other side. Why can you always expect to have the best experience if you buy vapes from a vape shop?

Vape Shops Always Have the Best Product Selections

The shelves at a vape shop aren’t filled with cigarettes. In fact, vape shops generally don’t carry the Big Tobacco e-cigarette brands at all. Vape shops also don’t carry the drinks and snack foods that you’d expect to find at a gas station. That leaves plenty of room for all of the latest and greatest vaping products. Vape shops always make an effort to carry whatever is popular with the vaping community and to offer the widest selection possible. Even if you only want to use disposable vapes and have no interest in switching to a refillable device, you’ll always enjoy the biggest selection of brands and flavors if you buy from a vape shop.

Vape Shops Carry Authentic Products

Vape shops don’t get their products from cut-rate distributors of knockoff electronics. They get their products from specialist vape distributors, and the distributors get their products from the original manufacturers. That means there’s virtually no chance of getting a fake disposable vape from a vape shop. Most importantly, if a counterfeit product did manage to slip through and end up in your hands, a good vape shop would gladly refund your money. Good luck getting a refund for any product purchased from a gas station – even if that product turns out to be fake.

Vape Shops Are Staffed by Experts Who Can Answer Your Questions

The most important thing about buying vapes from a vape shop is that the people who work at a vape shop actually understand vaping. If you buy enough vaping products over a long enough period of time, you’re eventually going to end up with a product that either doesn’t work as expected or doesn’t work at all. In addition, you may eventually reach a point where you’d like to upgrade to a more powerful device or start reducing your nicotine intake. You’re going to have questions, and the people at your local vape shop can answer those questions. When you buy vapes from a gas station, you’re on your own.