Cigars, Cigar Information and where to find Premium Cigars, Discounted Cigars and even Cheap Cigars

HAMMER TIME . . . ALL THE TIME!

Plus: Fourth Casa del Habano opens in China

Los Angeles, July 6 – Has Lew Rothman ever lost money on anything?

If so, he’s making up for it with his wild new sub-site – J-R Auctions – on his J-R Cigars website.

Introduced last week – Wednesday, June 29 to be exact – the site offers an enormous range of choices. A random count yesterday showed 348 items available, but that was only temporary as new items are added every 15 minutes!

There are two types of auction items: 24-hour items and weekly (seven day) items. Items are picked at random from J-R stock and a new 24-item is posted hourly and a new seven-day item is posted every quarter-hour.

However, as a discount cigar seller, J-R’s prices sometimes end up being better than the auction prices! For example:

• A typical sale was a box of 10 La Gloria Cubana Crown Imperials – monster cigars at 9 inches by 49 ring – for $46.00 after a starting bid of just $29.00; this auction drew 18 bids.

That’s a pretty good deal until you look at the regular J-R price for the same cigars. It’s $42.00 and you get a free Colibri Cigar II torch lighter thrown in. The only one who got torched on the auction was the winner!

• Ten minutes later, a “lucky” buyer took away a nice box of 25 Fonseca Zigarren mit Zeder No. 2 (5 3/4 x 43) for $51.00. That auction started at $37.00 and drew 15 bids.

If the “winner” had clicked to the regular sales section of the J-R site, he could have gotten the same cigars – on sale this week – for $49.95 and had a year’s subscription to Cigar Magazine thrown in for free!

What did P.T. Barnum (above) say someone being born every minute?

The J-R auction program competes with Famous Smoke Shop’s CigarAuctioneer.com site, which has its own fascinations.

Even deeper than the J-R Auction site, CigarAuctioneer.com was offering 356 “feature” auctions and another 105 “non-featured” auctions for a total of 461! The selection was bit more varied, as both cigars, sampler packs and accessories were on offer, including books, humidors, cutters, travel cases and so on. The only non-cigar item we saw on the J-R site was a package of Montecristo coffee.

In addition, the CigarAuctioneer.com site had a large number of sampler packs on the block and some unique “Yankee” auctions.

Instead of the typical one-item, one-winner auction style, CigarAuctioneer.com’s Yankee auctions offer multiple quantities of the same item, allowing you to bid for more than one, or – most often – for multiple bidders to win the same item. We noted 51 of these auctions in action yesterday.

And there are some nice items in the Yankee auction list, such as 40 of the Romeo y Julieta Reserva Real Robusto five-pack with a souvenir ashtray gift pack. The minimum bid was $15.95 and 30 bidders had anted up, from the minimum up to $25.00 each and some bidders were in for multiple buys.

Both sites have excellent tools to track auctions you are interested in. However, neither posts their own sales prices for the cigars on auctions, opting instead for the suggested retail price. And neither has a handy “completed items” feature as on eBay, where prospective buyers can check out what prior auction prices for a specific item was. That would certainly be a useful addition.

As eBay has been tightening up its policy of not allowing actual tobacco items to be sold on the site, Yahoo.com does offer trade in cigars. A sampling of its auction pages showed 545 cigar items on sale, most of which were cigars, including three boxes of Fuente Fuente Opus Xs for between $600 and $650 per box with days remaining on each.

What about eBay? Even without allowing trade in tobacco products per se, it still listed 6,671 lots related to cigars in some way during the day yesterday, including loads of humidors, lighters, cutters and empty boxes.

Let the games (and bidding) begin!

New Casa del Habano in China:
Last month marked the opening of a new Casa del Habano in Shanghai, the fourth in China and the first in what is perhaps China’s most cosmopolitan city.

Casas, which are franchised around the world and are supposed to carry all Havana export brands, are already in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The newest store resides in the Westin Shanghai.

News reports from the opening on June 17 indicated noted that the store was “filled to the rafters with Cubans” but also included some local Chinese-made cigars and a selection of Dominican-made Davidoffs. A total of 37 brands were available at the opening.

As is the Casa del Habano style, the store was inaugurated with a party featuring a roller from the El Laguito factory and the China Daily quoted manager Jeffrey Yu on his enthusiasm for business in the area.

“Lots of Chinese people are interested in cigars right now,” he said. “Some Chinese people like to smoke them and show off, because ‘cigar’ means ‘rich.’”

You’ll have to be to appreciate the prices. The story noted that a Cohiba Esplendido (a 7 x 47 churchill) costs 387 yuan each (about $47 U.S.) and a Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 (a 4 7/8 by 50 robusto) about $22 (179 yuan).
~ Rich Perelman

Bookmark

Email This

Comments (0) add comment