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| WILL RETAILERS WIN IN THE END? |
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Page 1 of 2  Plus: Our Register & Win winner of the week!Los Angeles, July 31 – It is perhaps more challenging to be a cigar retailer today than in any time in memory. Taxes have pushed the price of many quality cigar brands higher than customers can regularly afford. Smoking bans everywhere are pushing smokers off the streets and into their own homes. And competition from mail-order and Internet retailing operations are creating havoc with the so-called “bricks and mortar” set. But if things continue as they are, perhaps it will be the walk-in retailer who will emerge – in a slightly different form than today – as the ultimate winners as the battle over tobacco use heats up in the U.S. and other countries. Although almost all smoking bans are aimed at cigarettes, many of them carve out exceptions for retail tobacco stores and for cigar bars, where no one of sane mind would not expect smoking to be taking place. There are idiotic laws such as in the state of Washington and in Kansas City, Missouri, where there are no retail-store exemptions, but they are in the minority. Further, American lawmakers are cognizant that with tens of millions of smokers still out there and new ones starting every day (despite the work of the zealots), laws which are going to be widely ignored – like those of the Prohibition Era concerning alcoholic beverages – are bad laws and difficult, if not impossible, to enforce. That’s why tobacco-control laws are aimed at “protecting” children and keeping people away from secondhand smoke, which have a basis of popularity – however close or far away from provable scientific fact – that will ensure wide support. Thus, the next set of anti-tobacco measures which will sweep the nation is a series of copycat laws of Canadian provincial statutes which have banned the display of tobacco products in shops, sometimes even including cigar stores (almost most provinces exempt retail tobacconists) and even the denial of sale of tobacco altogether. On Tuesday, the County of San Francisco banned the sale of tobacco products in pharmacies and many (but not all) stores in which pharmacies are located, such as drug stores like Rite-Aid and Walgreens. It’s only the first of many such measures to come. So what is the future? It could look like this: |
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Did you know?
“A shape designated as "898" usually refers to its packing, in three layers of 8, 9 and 8 cigars.
