Cigar Costs

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alfredo_buscatti

alfredo_buscatti

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So I'm back in the game with a 35 lb cellar; maybe more. Bought 5 pipes off ebay for $165.00. Don't think I'll be paying 2 and 3 hundred for pipes anymore.

I'd been thinking that when the time was right I'd get a humidor and modestly enjoy cigars. But the cost has me reevaluating. I was at JR the other day and they tried to sell me the Oliva V Melanios. Looked like a rapturous cigar but the $13 single price tag put me off. $13 for one smoke? I don't think so. I just ordered two Den Pepin Blue @$7.50 per.

Don't think I'm going to go down this path just now. They say that if you shop wisely you can get good cigars for $5. I never found this to be so.

I've also been thinking that I would buy some of Stephen Books fabled tobacco. You can get 2 oz of some of his blends for ~$20.00; but for that price I can get what is considered to be expensive pipe tobacco, Solani's Silver Flake, 100 g. Maybe later, Stephen.
 
Alfredo, check out Nick Perdomo's offerings. His Lot 23 line is exceptional, especially the maduro. A very complex smoke in the $4 price range if bought by the box. I find his $4-$7 sticks to be comparable to other companies offerings in the $10 to $18 price range.

Another exceptional cigar for the money are the Padrons. Another $4 price point cigar with exceedingly complex flavor and construction.
 
For me finding deals on good cigars has become a major challange. I cringe at paying over $5 a stick. Maybe I'm cheap.

OK, I'm cheap.

I've done a lot of business with cigar-now, and Holts has had some deals on samplers but I keep thinking of the price while I'm smoking an expensive cigar. Not a problem when smoking a bowl of great pipe tobacco.
 
Agree, when I started 2$ cigars could be had and they were the baseline. Then it was 4, then 5, now it seems like 6-8$ is the cost for a decent stick. A reason why I've really stopped buying so much. That and cigars are more basketball and rock star than being about enjoyment.
 
Now that I'm enjoying my pipe smokes so much, I rarely ever go for a cigar. In fact, I can't remember the last cigar I smoked. But I like to keep a few in the humidor. There's something about it that makes me feel like I'm "treating" myself to something nice. I've decided to make cigars a very occasional thing, more like a celebration or something.
 
There are still good prices on really nice cigars out there. Today everyone wants boutique and fashionable smokes it seems, but if you allow yourself to appreciate the tried and true consistent good smokes, you'll be surprised at how affordable they are. Also, size is an issue. Large and long seems to be the trend. Don't get me started on the reasons, but let me just say it isn't because they produce a better smoke. If you buy a medium sized smoke you'll get a much lower price on a box.

Punch London Club or Elites.

http://www.cigarsinternational.com/proddisp.asp?item=CS-PUA
 
$13 bucks for a cigar is expensive?

Man, you yanks don't know how good you have it.

Before I started on the pipe, I smoked cubans. I still have a humidor full of about 150 of them,

I always bought mine on vacations to cuba (my wife and I could bring back 50 each with no duty), so I never paid the outrageous prices here. However, the hoya de monterrey double coronas I used to smoke cost about $60 bucks a stick up here.
 
I buy a bunch of $4-$6 dollar cigars, throw in the humidor, and dip into it when I'm headed to the pool - just more convenient than pipes, and the cost to keep a well-stocked humidor would skyrocket if I smoked them much more often than a few a week in the summer months. I do enjoy cigars and would probably reach for one more often if the cost wasn't as high as it is.
 
Since picking up the pipe I, too, smoke less cigars. But I still keep them and enjoy them as a great change of pace.

Cost is certainly a factor in my buying. But there are good smokes for $5-8. Famous cigar and cigar monster are two places to get deals. 5 packs with free shipping or good box deals.

They'll never be as cheap as pipe tobak is, but like many have said, there are times when a cigar fits or hits better than a pipe.
 
There's lots of great deals on c-bid for $2-$3 stick if one is patient and resists the urge to bid it up beyond your comfort zone.

I say this not as an experienced customer of the site. In fact I've never even visited it.

I only report this from intel from the cigar site I moderate. Apparently lots of bargains if one knows their limits and has a good sense of what the reasonable value is of a specific vitola.

Beyond that, I'll confess to being a recovering cigar addict. Never did the action sites though. Not my style.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.............

:silent:





Cheers,

RR
 
I love cigars and still probably smoke 2-5 per week. Part of the reason I picked up pipes more seriously was the cost of cigars. Little did I know that PAD and TAD could be even more costly than a fully stocked humidor. I'd say I spend way more on pipes then I ever did on cigars.

Several things I've also learned about cigars is that a $3 stick can smoke just as good as a $25 one, there are duds in every brand, and a "high dollar" cigar's cost is usually more quality control, rarer tobacco and packaging.

Right now my favorite is Diesel, which if you buy by the box is $3 a stick. Can't beat that.
 
If you want to fill a humidor cheaply, check out these tasty sticks.

Punch Rare Corojo Rothschild. a box of 50 for about $160
Nica Libre-Principe box of 25 for about $50

Both are about a 30-45 minute smoke.

Ken
 
In my year's sojourn in cigar-land I too felt that the high-dollar cigars were the best. Like you said, better tobacco, better construction, better blending. I smoked Don Carlos by Fuente, Pardron 1926 #2 Belicoso, Don Pepin Blue Label Torpedos, E.P. Carillo 2012 Anniversary Dark Rituals, etc. But in so doing I always knew that I was smoking way too rich; any of these cigars would be fine twice a week, but not daily. I sold wide swaths of my pipe tobacco cellar and and almost all of my well-grained smooth pipes to keep my three humidors filled. One member said that buying pipes was far more expensive than cigars, but my answer to this would be that when you buy a $250.00 estate, if cared for properly, it will last a lifetime and become a kind of friend. You are also buying quality.

Compare that to getting just 20 of the Dark Rituals for the same price. I was talking to a sales clerk at JR last week about what I felt was the unjustified price of cigars, and he replied that aging tobacco costs a lot of money, that it must be properly maintained and someone needs to rotate it, whatever that means. (This reminds me the piles of raw cigar tobacco that start the fermentation process by generating heat inside the pile. Someone with training tends it by remixing it so that the hottest leafs are intermixed with the rest of the tobacco, so that it doesn't turn into goo.) Aging also ties up capital, and this is also a kind of cost.

He also said that the bump up from cheap cigars to those ~$5.00 produced the most value. It would be great to find a document that specified the quality that you typically get with low, medium and high-cost cigars that discussed exactly what changes take place in cigars. He also said that guys come in complaining about plugged cigars at the low end but that was typically because the rollers at that level are beginners. I in fact found my share of plugged cigars at the mid-level; I didn't smoke cheap cigars.

In the end both pipes and cigars are great, but the tastes that I experienced in cigars are much more confined to the tobaccos that comprise them. I found plenty of those tastes sufficient for a good smoke; there was enough variety. But moving from the typical tobacco components in many blends, VA, burley, perique and latakia, on to a latakia heavy and Orientals minus latakia, there are an incredible number of tastes and families, as mentioned.

I'm thinking I'll shop ebay for big humidor just in case I get rich and want to fill it but for now keep no more than 50 cigars in it, high-ends as above and also Cubans. El Rey del Mundo and Rafael Gonzalez make panatelas/coronas they I love and go for about $90.00 a box; and treat myself to cigars when the urge hits.

I like the pipe much better.
 
alfredo_buscatti":six7fslb said:
I like the pipe much better.
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For me, pipe tobacco is much more complex than the experience I have with cigars. When I first started smoking a pipe, I remember telling a friend that it would never replace a good cigar.

However, once I invested the time to learn how to load my tobacco, and propery smoke my pipes, as well as clean them properly, my pipe experience began to be much more enjoyable for a variety of reasons.

Now, my cigar cabinet humidor is almost filled to capacity, and it takes months to smoke enough cigars, that I can make room for a couple new boxes.

I have reached the point in pipe collecting, where I feel that I am saving a tremendous amount of money on cigars, and so I am more focused on building my cellar, and saving even more money on pipe tobacco for future consumption. Also, when I do smoke a cigar, I can afford to smoke something that has at least a mid range price point.

For me, collecting pipes and pipe tobacco , is much more enjoyable and rewarding than simply buying and smoking premium cigars.
 
No affiliation here, but cigarbid has been very, very good to me. I am an Oliva fan and there are always steals to be had there with a little patients.
 
I was an avid cigar smoker and collector for over 10 years, However the cost was just getting rediculous!

I have been a member of the cigar lounge at my local b&m for the last 6 years and in that time have seen the costs skyrocket. First New York State passed a tobacco tax of 75% of the wholesale price of the cigar. That meant that a cigar with a wholesale price of $5 was now costing the b&m $8.75. add to that the sales tax and the retail mark-up and you were easily at $10 for the cigar. Soon after the manufacturers raised there prices, Justified I guess because production costs have risen over the years. These factors had me looking for an alternative.

A co-worker, who is a pipe smoker, recommended giving a pipe a try. At first I was reluctant, but said what the hell, I'll give it a try. Glad I did! I found that with the variety of blends available I could easily find something to staisfy my pallet. I thoroughly enjoy a pipe and smoke mostly pipes now. I have since recommended pipes to fellow members of the cigar lounge and now we have a group of about 5 avid pipe smokers and several occasional pipe smokers who frequent the lounge.

I will still enjoy an occasional cigar but with the money I have been saving I can now splurge on rare or ultra premium cigars.
 
Iron Mike, here's what I don't understand. If I lived in New York, why wouldn't I just buy from an out of state online retailer to avoid the NY state tax? I mean, I assume you don't have customs officers checking packages mailed between states. And if its as easy as I make it out to be, wouldn't that just absolutely kill local B&Ms in NY?
 
I can't answer for Mike, but I'll just point out that there's a social aspect to the B&Ms that can't be ignored. In most states they're the only places to legally smoke indoors in public.
 
I hear you on that George. And I guess that means I would buy a stick now and again when I go to the B&M. But what about the case of 25 I want to smoke at the cottage or the weekend bbq? I would have thought it must drastically impact sales.
 
I imagine it does. In the state of Michigan, it is technically unlawful for me to possess any tobacco product without a state tax stamp on it, but as you mentioned there are no interstate customs.
 
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