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SHOCKER: ATLANTIC CIGAR RANKS AS NO. 1 NATIONAL RETAILER |
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 Exclusive 10-point comparison program ranks 95 retailers
Los Angeles, August 5 – To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “you never know what you get when you compile rankings.”
We set out to rank the national mail order and on-line retailers in the U.S. on a combination of price and brand availability. It got to be a lot more complex than we thought it would be, but we finally completed the project from data sampled on the Internet during the last ten days.
The result?
New York’s Atlantic Cigar Company ended up ranked no. 1, thanks to a combination of excellent pricing on a broad selection of 163 standardized brands.
Atlantic Cigar had the best average price rankings on our “basket” of nine boxes of cigars on which we compared prices:
• Avo No. 5
• Arturo Fuente 8-5-8
• Fonseca 8-9-8
• H. Upmann Churchill
• Hoyo de Monterrey Double Corona
• Macanudo Hyde Park
• Montecristo No. 1
• Partagas Almirante
• Perdomo Reserve X
Atlantic had the best prices we found on boxes of Fonseca and Montecristo, tied for best on the Hoyo Double Coronas and was third-best on Arturo Fuente and Partagas. The result was a price ranking points total of 96.31 out of a possible 100. We offer them our congratulations.
Our procedure was to compile prices on these nine cigars from the 95 vendors and rank them against each other with the best-priced vendor getting 100 points. We then compiled the number of brands each vendor sells, using a standardized list derived from our Perelman’s Pocket Cyclopedia of Cigars to be sure that each brand was counted the same way from retailer to retailer. The list of the number of brands sold was then also compared, retailer vs. retailer, with the winner getting 100 points. The two ranking scores were then combined to form the final, overall placement. A perfect score would be 200 points; Atlantic scored an impressive 191.21.
Atlantic was joined in the top five by BestCigarPrices.com in second, followed by Cigars International, giants J-R Cigars and Mike’s Cigars. Only 8.4 points separated the first five on the list. The full roster of our National Retailer Rankings is only available to our CigarWire subscribers.
Our exclusive Comparison Shopper, also on the CigarWire, will be updated to showcase our top-ranked retailers to give you the best opportunity to save even more.
Tomorrow, we’ll have some highlights of why it pays to shop: the enormous differences we found between retailers on our nine selections. Get ready to save!
~ Rich Perelman
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