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Michael Douglas as the cigar-chomper Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Cigar smokers are a dying breed, research suggests
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Cigar smoking dying out as only super rich and cabbies puff on
Cigar smoking is on the endangered list, with predictions that the habit could die out in Britain within two decades as current rates of puffing threaten to splutter to a halt.
British consumption of cigars has fallen by 80 per cent over the past 20 years, and there are now estimated to be only 300,000 regular cigar smokers left in the UK, compared with about 700,000 ten years ago. The value of the UK cigar market has plummeted by a fifth in the five years since the introduction of the smoking ban in 2007, theFinancial Times reported.
While the super-rich continue to pass around the Cohibas on the smoking terraces of Mayfair, it is the mass-market smoker, typified by the man finding happiness in the Hamlet advertisements, who is most in danger of extinction.
Mitchell Orchant, chairman of the Association of Independent Cigar Specialists, insisted that the example of two of the country’s most famous cigar smokers, Jimmy Saville and John McCririck, had had “nil effect” on the product’s declining popularity. Instead, he blamed the recession for sucking the middle out of the market.
He said: “The premium end of the market and the very low end of the market are booming. It is the middle that is getting squeezed, which maybe reflective of the middle classes. It could be a lot of cigar smokers who were paying £7 or £8 have traded down, whereas the rich have been getting richer during the recession so they are spending more and more on super premium and rare cigars.”
Specialist retailers are now concentrating their efforts on wooing wealthy customers, who still appear prepared to spend up to £8,000 on a box of vintage cigars at auction, or splash out on the most famous luxury brands.
Mr Orchant said that his company, C.Gars, which owns ten cigar stores in Britain as well as a mail-order business, has seen a 20 per cent growth thanks to luxury sales.
He claimed that the industry had risen above the old cigar-chomping stereotypes such as Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street, and pointed to the positive example of Simon Le Bon, of Duran Duran, whom his company named Cigar Smoker of the Year this year.
Simon Evans, of Imperial Tobacco, Britain’s second largest tobacco company, said that the stale image of the typical middle-market cigar smoker as an old man with a comb-over hadn’t helped. “It is seen by younger people as something chosen by the older smoker.”
Michael Clements, consultant at the historic cigar specialist Sautter of Mount Street, in Mayfair, said it was hardly surprising that such a symbol of wealth had drifted out of reach of the mass market. “Our customers are millionaires, billionaires and taxi drivers. You’re not going to be smoking cigars if you’re on benefits. You’ve got to be able to afford it.”
- The Times
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