Unlike many shops, his has been able to remain open throughout 2020. My April was down 31 percent without the Masters tournament.” “If The Masters had not been postponed, my percent increase for the year would be much higher. “My sales are up 20 percent as a result of my customers working from home where they can smoke during their workday,” said Russell Wilder, owner of Top Shelf Cigar and Tobacco Shoppe, in Augusta, Georgia. The pandemic has caused customers to change their work and recreational habits, and some shops have been able to turn that into increased sales. So, people are smoking more, myself included.” But Dababneh is among the minority of shops in this survey, one of the 41.4 percent who said sales were up. Not just our business, our lives,” said Abe Dababneh, owner of 10 Smoke Inn locations in South Florida. are all a fraction of pre-pandemic levels.” After reopening, traffic, revenue, spending habits etc. “It has been catastrophic,” said Matthew Arcella, owner of six Davidoff of Geneva outlets in Las Vegas. One quarter (24.6 percent) of those who closed had to shut down for a month, and 64.5 percent had to close their doors for more than a month. Some of the closures were relatively short, with 8.8 percent reporting a shutdown of two weeks or less, but most of them were long. Sixty-four percent of the shops in our survey had to close during the pandemic. Said Kurt Pennington, owner of Elite Cigar Café outside of Dallas: “We have a tough road ahead.” “Luckily, it has also caused our client base to coalesce around us and support us through it all.” “It has made for a much more challenging business climate as far as employees, product supply, and accessibility and hours are concerned,” said Paul Banducci, manager of Bulldog Pipe and Cigar in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “Customer count is way down, people are not coming back,” he said. Steve Castro of Davidus Cigars Ltd., which has 12 stores in Maryland, said the impact has been severe.
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