Stingl: Quit-smoking billboard hangs right over a cigarette shop, but does it do any good?

The billboard shows a snuffed-out cigarette, a man who looks hopeful he'll never smoke again and the message, "You didn't fail at quitting. You just haven't finished the process."

For maximum effect, the sign looms large right above the Cigarette Depot at the corner of 76th and Center streets on Milwaukee's west side.

"No newspaper," the clerk behind security glass said when I stopped by to inquire about this buzz kill for business. I asked if he liked the sign right over his roof. "No, but I can't do nothing," came the reply from the robbery-proof booth.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration paid for the sign as part of its Every Try Counts campaign launched in 35 counties across America last year.

"These messages," said a kickoff press release, "will be displayed in and around gas stations and convenience stores — retail locations where smokers face a multitude of triggers and that typically feature cigarette advertisements."

I hadn't noticed the sign, but alert reader George Gonis told me it recently went up.

"Perhaps a photo cliche, but it still gave me a chuckle," he said.

I can appreciate the tension created by a sign discouraging smoking perched atop a shop that hopes everyone keeps right on puffing. It would be like an anti-consumerism sign at the entrance to a shopping mall.

The billboard is hard to miss as you approach the intersection, but the customers I talked to paid it no mind.

Do signs like this work? I put the question to Tom Morgan, a retired railroad worker who lives nearby. 

"They haven't done me any good," he laughed. "You know what good you're going to get from quitting. This billboard doesn't need to tell you that."

He's 65 and has smoked since he was a teenager, except for one year that he quit. Morgan said he works out every day and does yoga. A little nicotine with his namaste.

On this morning, he bought four packs of Marlboro. He does a mind trick where he never buys a whole carton, "because I always think I'm going to quit."

Billboards don't help break the habit, customer Mary Dean told me. (I thought people who puff might be reluctant to give me their names, but no one was. Dean even shared that she is a retired superintendent of the Maple Dale-Indian Hill School District.)

So what does help? "It's an internal impulse," she said. "I'm in the process of trying to do it."

Eventually, anyway. Dean bought three cartons of Benson & Hedges for $313. These 30 packs will last less than a month.

Her brand goes back to 1873, when Americans were smoking waaaay fewer cigarettes. The habit exploded in the first half of the 20th century until peaking in the "Mad Men" years of the ’50s and ’60s at more than 40% of adults smoking. Now that it's abundantly clear it can kill you, that number has dropped to 15%.

But cigarettes still cause an estimated 480,000 deaths a year nationwide. That's 480,000 more than the marijuana that Wisconsin continues to criminalize and keep from cancer patients, but I digress.

Michael Felberbaum, an FDA spokesman, understands the billboards won't sway everyone.

"The intent is to reach those who are interested in quitting and have tried quitting in the last year and were unsuccessful," he said.

I was surprised to see smaller versions of the billboard message actually hanging in the window and on the wall of the smoke shop.

Does a store peddling tobacco and vaping devices really care about our health? That's not quite it. Turns out the FDA pays the store to display the signs.

Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Follow him at Facebook or on Twitter @columnboy.