**From CigarCyclopedia**
Los Angeles, September 8, 2009 – The more things change, the more they stay the same . . . almost.
We normally compile our U.S. retailer rankings, looking for the top online cigar retailers in the nation in the spring, but with the imposition of the SCHIP taxes on April 1, we were unanimously advised to wait until things shook out a bit. So we waited until the end of summer to check and see who would come out best in a measure of brand pricing, breadth, shipping and a new category, availability of real-time inventory, and for the fifth time in five rankings, we have a new no. 1:
Quality Fresh Cigars, better known as CigarFox.com, of Troy, Michigan.
In the closest finish in the history of our retailer report, only 1.4 points separated the top four finishers. The top ten:
# (1) Quality Fresh Cigars (CigarFox.com) of Troy, Michigan
Dan Jenuwine’s family has been retailing cigars since 1946 and began a mail-order operation as the Cigar Boom hit its height in 1996. He reports sales of more than 50 million cigars a year and compiled 92.8 points out of a possible 100 to top the 2009 Rankings list. The site had finished as high as 25th previously, in 2006 and 2007.
The process by which these shops were ranked included five different measurements:
# (1) A pricing survey was made on August 26 of 166 Web sites, the most we have ever checked, for four ultra-popular, widely-available cigars in boxes of 25: Macanudo Baron de Rothschild, Montecristo No. 1, Punch Pita and Romeo y Julieta Bully.
# (2) Based on the average price of these four cigars, the sites were ranked 1-166 and the top 25 were selected for a broader pricing test, this time of 16 cigars on September 1, with four each from the same four brands.
# (3) A test of breadth of brands was made, with two points given if the retailer had each of 10 popular brands in the U.S., including Acid, Arturo Fuente, Avo, Baccarat, Excalibur, Gispert, Hoyo de Monterrey, Partagas, Rocky Patel Vintage and Saint Luis Rey. All 17 finalist sites had nine or all ten of these brands.
# (4) A new ranking element was included for real-time inventory, worth five points. Six of the top seven had this feature.
# (5) Of the 17 sites which had all 16 of our price-test cigars, we checked shipping policies and scored each site from 2-20 points.
