CIGARETTES CHEAPER CHAIN SELLS ATTITUDE.

Byline: Vicki Haddock San Francisco Examiner 

They are sweeping across California and beyond at the rate of one a day - Cigarettes Cheaper stores that welcome smoking pariahs with open arms and sell virtually nothing but tobacco products.

Bargain hunters can select from 380 varieties of cigarettes, plus cigars, chewing tobacco and order forms for Virginia Slims pajamas and Marlboro bedrolls. Building on the success of the first store, which opened in Hayward, Calif., a mere 20 months ago, Cigarettes Cheaper now operates 231 outlets and plans for 500 by year's end. It has the astonishing aim of cornering one-fifth of the $45 billion annual cigarette trade nationwide by the year 2000.

How could this happen in, of all places, California? In a state at the forefront of the anti-smoking movement, where pharmacists are pushing to ban cigarettes from drugstores, other retailers are shrinking the amount of shelf space devoted to cigarettes, and polite society regards tobacco peddlers as merchants of death?

Simple: Capitalism, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Cigarettes Cheaper exploits a consumer niche elsewhere scorned.

The Roscoe family of Benicia, headed by patriarch John Roscoe, is behind the business. These are people who relish nothing more than giving political correctness a poke in the eye.

The Roscoes have a history as provocateurs: They beat back the state's attempts to punish them for selling milk too cheaply in their Cheaper grocery stores, balked when Dixon city officials insisted they obtain a permit for a 50-foot-tall promotional dinosaur looming over Interstate 80, and outraged establishment types with their ``bagatorial'' grocery bag editorials such as ``DON'T VOTE - It Only Encourages Them. Your Vote is Statistically Insignificant.''

The bagatorials - with their curmudgeonly libertarian attacks on everything from water conservation to child labor laws - are so popular with customers of the Cheaper grocery chain and the cigarette store offshoot that some inquire of clerks, ``Is the new June bag out yet?''

Publishing house Simon and Schuster is releasing a collection of Roscoe bagatorials this fall.

The Roscoes vow to outwit and outlast their newest opponents, whom one store ad refers to as ``hyperventilating health fascists.''

``These stores use a clever marketing ploy: They appeal to smokers as an ostracized group, and encourage their natural instinct to identify with a holdout group, not unlike the Freemen up in Montana,'' said Scott Thomas, director of tobacco education for the American Lung Association of San Francisco and San Mateo counties.

``These guys know what works psychologically, even though the product they're selling is addictive and dangerous. And it'll make them a lot of money in the process.''

Nobody in the Roscoe family smokes, and they offer incentives for employees to follow their example. But they emphasize the rights of smokers to choose how they live or die.

Ask them about the morality of profiting from a product hazardous to human health, and they volley back Voltaire on the essence of free choice. Press them about whether ``choice'' is relevant when you're talking about users addicted to nicotine, and they counterclaim that Twinkies are addictive and insist anyone can quit with a real desire to do so.

``I've learned a lot from my father-in-law,'' said company President Mark Baldwin, married to Roscoe's daughter, Sally. ``He taught me, `Never believe a statistic you didn't make up yourself.' ''

Cigarettes Cheaper stores have sprung up in suburban strip malls in the West and as far away as the Indiana border of greater Chicago. They follow a prototype: 1,000 square feet, fluorescent lights, a plethora of Philip Morris paraphernalia and, eventually, a life-size tobacco store Indian statue to add ambience.

A Marlboro carton sells for about $14.50 - a few dollars less than almost any competitor. Philip Morris manufactures a few cut-rate lines specifically for the chain, including one that bills itself as the commuters' cigarette, Gridlock.

``The last time I bought cigarettes anyplace else, it was a nightmare,'' said June Price, who stocks up on Camels from a Cigarettes Cheaper store in downtown San Francisco.