A Tale of Two Headshops

I have been on the hunt for empty cigar boxes.  I have a locker/humidor at the shop I hang out and work at, and I want to replace the boxes my cigars currently reside in, and give them back to the shop.

 For those that do not know, you keep cigars in a contained space, a humidor, and you should of have them between 65 and 72 percent humidity.  That is optimum.  With a temperature roughly the same.  If you go to low, they can dry out and become extremely hard, if you go to high, the cigars can become soggy, soft and grow fungus.  Not what you want to happen to your cigars. But I digress, back to the hunting for cigar boxes.

With this being my mission, I decided to stop randomly at a place I have never been in before.  I knew they sold cigars, but the primary mission of this establishment is to assist people in achieving a state of euphoria in means that are not consanguineous to cigars. That being said I stopped in to see if they had any empty cigar boxes.  I first stopped in to the establishment on Monroe Avenue.   

The place was clean, and the people were nice and surprisingly professional.  The area for the cigars was taken care of, and the cigars looked like they were being tended for properly.  They had an excellent selection of cigars, but only one empty box, which they allowed me to take, free of charge.  They nice lady behind the counter explained that they set them up by the door, and people can just grab them.

Armed with that knowledge, I decided to visit their other location, located on Lake Avenue.

This venue was drastically different than the other one.   

Dramatically different. 

If this was the DC Universe, the shop on Monroe would have been Kal-El, son of Jor-El, and the one on Lake would have been Bizarro.   

They had no empty boxes, but it was the condition of the cigars that caught my attention.  Many of the boxes looked like someone had dribbled paint on them, and they were stacked haphazardly in the display cases.  I would say 40% of the cigars I could see had mold on them. 

Not the good kind. Yes, there is a good kind. 

 There is Mold, and then there is Bloom(Plume).

Mold leaves a stain when it's removed, but plume comes off without a mark. Plume (or Bloom) is good; essentially this is solidified oil, which usually is a sign that your cigars are aging well. Mold is a sign that your cigars are in too humid an environment.

These cigars were covered in mold.  I asked to see a few, and they were so soft, I could of used them as a pillow.  I felt bad for the cigars. I saw one of the humidity gauges and it read around 85% humidity.  The girl behind the counter stated that maybe they should turn down the humidity. 

No kidding. You think?

I told her that the cigars may be beyond saving depending on how long they have been in the type of condition.  It is not impossible, just difficult and time consuming.  Time I doubt that they will give the cigars.  That is after all, not their main source of income. I am just surprised that any source of potential income was in such bad condition, and that it was the same company. 

I will end my tale of two headshops by saying if you are going to utilize them, go to the one on Monroe Ave if you live in my city.  The one on Lake is squalid. Skip it.