Super Premium or Stupid Premium
The Quality of a Cigar is not Directly Proportionate to it's Price
by Lew Rothman, borrowed from Smoke Magazine
There are loads of cigar brands out there that are dubbed “super premiums,” but, as everyone knows by now, that title relates more to the price of a cigar than it does to its quality. Let’s face it, how many former “super premium” brands have you seen whose retail price has plunged from a whopping six, seven, or eight dollars a cigar to a buck or two?
Three or four years ago, in this very column, I wrote, “the only difference between a $10 cigar and a $2 cigar is eight dollars.” Just about every manufacturer in the entire cigar industry was outraged, and said “Rothman, you’re ruining the business.” Well, who’s got the last laugh now? There’s gotta be 40 or 50 so-called “super premium” brands that previously advertised right here in SMOKE that have “taken the gas pipe” in the last few years.
I’m not sure if everyone is familiar with an annual publication called Perelman’s Pocket Cyclopedia of Cigars, but in case you’re not, it’s a little book that lists just about every cigar brand under the sun. I assume that the way they compile their information is by going through every mail-order catalogue and Web site and scribbling down the name of every cigar for sale anywhere, regardless of sales volume. Frankly, I myself am not familiar with more than half the brands in the book. Anyway, I’m not here to tell you about what’s in this book. The reason I mention it at all is to tell you about what’s not in this year’s book. What’s not in this year’s book are literally hundreds of cigar brands from the prior years - they’re gone, dead, mort - and each and every one of those brands had a common claim: They were all made by the most experienced rollers from the finest tobaccos available anywhere.
Hopefully there’s someone out there who can tell me what the less-experienced rollers have been doing for the last decade or, better yet: if everybody uses the world’s finest tobaccos, what do they do with the rest of it? You know, the 90% of the tobacco that’s not the “finest”?
You wanna know the truth? I have never written this anywhere before, but here’s how you make a really “hot,” expensive, super-premium brand, and it has nothing at all to do with the quality of the product:
1. You make a really good cigar in a really nice package.
2. You go around to a bunch of local tobacco retailers and tell them, “Mr. Shopkeeper, if you buy this brand you can at least double your money and make $4 to $5 on every single cigar you sell.”
3. You tell the shopkeeper: “You can confidently recommend our cigar to every customer in your town, because our company guarantees that you will be the only shop for a hundred miles around that carries this cigar brand.”
4. You tell the shopkeeper: “Our company will never sell to any discounters or mail-order and Internet retailers unless they swear on a stack of Bibles that they will never sell these cigars for more than 10 percent off the full price.” In fact, you take the shopkeeper on the side and tell him, “Listen friend, you’re not gonna have any competition selling these cigars and, in fact, you could even charge more than full price. Who’s gonna know the difference?”
5. Then you really get the storekeeper excited by telling him, “Every so often we’ll release some new limited-production, numbered cigar, with impossibly old vintage tobaccos, for which you can charge even more money than the regular limited-edition cigars we normally manufacture - a limited-limited reserve edition, so to speak. (Good grief, doesn’t this sound kinda familiar, like when your kids bought limited-edition baseball cards a few years ago and in the limited-edition cards was a gold limited-edition card that was even more limited than the regular limited ones?)
6. Then you give the shopkeeper the pièce de resistance (that’s French for the knockout punch): “When you feature our limited-edition brand, you’ll be placed on the list to receive an “allocation” of our Anniversario, Centennial, and, hold onto your hat.... even our Millennium Edition cigars, which you can make a bloody fortune on ...” That’s how you make a cigar brand hot, and that seems to work time and time again, with brand after brand. Then, after a while, the average Joe Blow consumer (that’s you, regardless of your income or station in life) realizes that this “super premium” cigar is just another cigar, no better, and in many instances, not even as good as the lower-priced cigar he was previously smoking.
As an example of how blatant the selling above really is, let me tell you about an advertisement that was in a tobacco retailer magazine that even shocked me: It was for a “super premium” cigar called Aristoff. This particular brand was “pushed” in many tobacco shops for one reason only: profit margin.
Was it a good cigar? Absolutely. In fact, it’s an excellent cigar that comes in some of the nicest packaging ever produced, but it is not a cigar that needs to be sold at prices from $6 to $18 each. At $3 to $5 dollars when sold individually, or $2 to $4, when sold by the box, it would still be a profitable product for both the manufacturer and the retailer.
The inflated price of Aristoff was actually explained in their advertisement to retailers in the industry magazine. The advertisement told them that Aristoff was the most profitable cigar to sell, and (and I quote), “Thank goodness Lew Rothman (which is me, a notorious discounter) will never get his hands on this brand.” Can you [expletive deleted] believe this?
Well, to make a long story short, Aristoff “exclusived” themselves right outta the cigar business, along with a whole bunch of other “exclusive” guys, and their cigars then began to appear at prices that were about 70% off the original Aristoff price. Instead of $10 to $18 a cigar, they were sold at about $2 a stick.
So, since you people are always asking me questions, I figure it’s fair if I ask you some questions, for a change. Here are my questions:
a) Now that Aristoff is being sold at an affordable price (and I should know ... I bought the brand), and is still an extremely well-made cigar, and is still in the exact same packaging, is it no longer a “super premium?”
b) Does a cigar go from being a “super premium” back to being “just a cigar” if the retail price is reduced from $10 to $2?
c) Is there anybody left who is dumb enough to believe that a stick of tobacco weighing less than an ounce can possibly be worth more than $10?
I guess the bottom line is that there are two kinds of cigars: good ones and bad ones. During the Cigar Boom years, consumers didn’t have much of a choice, because everything was being sold at super-premium prices, the good and the bad. Today, they do have a choice. There are lots of yesterday’s super-premiums around at low prices, and there are a bevy of new brands from well-known cigar makers that are really well-priced.
Use your head when you’re purchasing cigars. Forget about the price and concentrate on the cigar. The measure of enjoyment you get from a fine cigar has nothing to do with the amount of money you spend to obtain it. Personally, if I’m in comfortable surroundings, with people I like, I can smoke just about anything and be very, very happy.
Listen, friends, I haven’t written this editorial to dissuade you from buying cigars at your local tobacco retailers, who, by and large, are just a bunch of hard-working, dedicated people trying to make a living in a very rough and over-taxed industry.
The reason I’ve written this column is to alert you to the fact that cigars are a consumable product, just like coffee, tea, or milk. No matter how hard you try, and no matter what methods you employ to make the product, there is nothing on earth that can make one really well-made cigar cost 4 or 5 times as much as another really well-made cigar.
Cigars are products that are sold over and over to the exact same people, every day, in every town. If the smoking public is given a fair value for their hard-earned money, then they become loyal, not only to the brands they deem worthy, but to the shops that sell those products. The job of the tobacco retailer is to feature the brands that are worthy of the consumer’s money, and the job of the consumer is to determine exactly what those products are worth.
- Lew Rothman
