Chesapeake Smoke

Well, I’ve spewed plenty of electrons in my rants about women and cigars, time to move on and change the subject.

How’s your 401(k) doing?

Yeah, mine sucks too.

How’s your job situation? Are you feeling skittish in this economy, thinking you might want to put more money aside for a rainy day? Is that cutting into your cigar smoking?

I don’t have a lot of empirical data with which to make a case. I do, however, have nearly ten years as a retail tobacconist, and I know slow sales when I see them. I realize that sales figures are proprietary information, and cigar shop owners are loathe to make them public, but my biggest fear is that the premium tobacco industry will bury its head in the sand and deny the
onset of a recession rather than expose their quarterly or yearly sales trends.

Sales at Titan have slowed a good bit. I suspect many other shops are experiencing this same drop. A week ago, the big headline in the news was the slowdown in retail sales, with luxury retailers taking the biggest hit. A cigar, especially a premium hand-rolled cigar, is a luxury item. I expect the quibbles about the cost of quality … “You get what you pay for” … but a lot of what you pay for in a “bricks-and-mortar” shop is the expertise of the tobacconist. Otherwise, you might as well go to the Internet and pay a whole lot less.

My fear is that this economy is going to wreak havoc on smaller cigar shops. Why should consumers on a tight budget pay extra for us to have a storefront? Cigars International, for example, has a big selection at their website, and they pack their stuff well and ship fast.

That’s all well and good if your idea of interpersonal interaction is with a mouse and keyboard. Order your cigars online, wait for them to arrive, then puff your stogies while sitting at the computer, playing Worlds of Warcraft and avoiding human contact.

What the traditional tobacconist offers, in addition to a skilled and knowledgeable workforce (Thank you, Jorge and Tobacconist University!), is a place to meet and congregate. I’ve known lots of cigarette smokers, for whom lighting up was a habit and an obsession. Cigar smokers are a different breed, we crave the companionship, the camaraderie of other cigar smokers. We want to talk trash with each other, share stories of great smokes and the accompanying great circumstances, root for our teams on the wide-screen (Go Caps!), we want to show off the cigar bands as we puff an Opus X double corona. Cigar smoking is a social pastime, we smoke in the company of friends.

So it stands to reason that we should congregate in the cigar shop. Buy your sticks there, smoke them there, hang with your boys there.

So even though the economy sucks, cigar smokers need to support their local shops. State and local laws and ordinances restrict where we can smoke, and the anti-smoking Nazis are trying to hem us in every way they can. The closing of more cigar stores due to economic conditions just plays into their hands.

Retailers, however, need to do their part. Keep prices fair and competitive, control costs, and offer specials or discounts to customers. Don’t take your customers for granted or make rash assumptions. Help them out in these trying financial times and keep them from turning to the Internet for their smokes.