I work for a well known national convenience store chain, and I work for the company as a store manager. We have people who want to come in and buy popular brands of cigarettes who presumably go to high taxed states and sell them for profit. In normal situations purchasers are limited to five cartons per person per day. So it wasn't unusual to see cars/vehicles full of people come in to buy as many popular brands of cigarettes as possible.
Anyway after a while of having these people buy out all of my stock of cigarettes, one of the leaders, for lack of a better term here, approached me about purchasing large quantities of cigarettes. We are talking about hundreds of cartons of cigarettes here. This was somewhat alarming to me, so naturally, before proceeding I went to my superior, a district manager, to verify that doing something like this would be acceptable.
The district manager admitted to me in text messages that it was acceptable, and that this particular situation is going on at several of their locations within their assigned area. They said that I must ring the cigarettes in quantities of five and that I, as the SM, must be the one to handle all of the transactions (I am assuming this is due to the large amounts of cash). I confirmed that the district manager was ok with it and they said they were…and that basically it sucks that it has to be done that way, but it is what it is.
Anyway this has been going on for months with no real issues, but recently another DM was made aware of the process of selling the cigarettes and she was shocked/horrified that this was happening. She didn't tell me to either continue or stop, but she said she needed to consult with higher ups to see what to do.
She spoke with the higher ups who have no issues with us selling in excess of 500 cartons a week to people as long as they are rung up 5 cartons at a time. It was also confirmed to me that multiple (at least 10) stores are currently active in doing the same thing my store is doing. In fact one of the people who deals with cigarettes wants to talk with me to discuss adjusting our price point so we can sell even more quantities of cigarettes. This is a new development that happened recently.
So my question is,
Do I do anything? Can my employer be in legal trouble? Can I be in legal trouble? Should I report my employer? Can I be terminated over this? Do I wait and see what happens?
How exactly should I proceed?