Cornell & Diehl: Carolina Red Flake available at smokingpipes.com

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briarbuck

Lifer
Nov 24, 2015
2,287
5,492
10 for me. I try and leave a little for the rest of the people.
I may add a few more in a few weeks if I like it (esp. if there's some when the SG arrives).

 

timt

Lifer
Jul 19, 2018
2,844
22,729
At a 25 tin limit, I'm a little surprised it went so fast. All right fess up, how many of you have multiple accounts going at SP? :puffy:

 
Jan 28, 2018
12,952
134,578
66
Sarasota, FL
Think about it though. 8000 divided by 25 is 320. So only 320 Customers have to buy the limit to buy it out. Obviously, not everybody buys the limit. But if 800 Customers buy 10, it's gone. That's not much when you consider the big picture. And I'm sure there are people with multiple accounts who buy it to resell on fleaBay. How hard would it be to get your wife and brother to sign up and buy 25 tins?

 

timt

Lifer
Jul 19, 2018
2,844
22,729
I suppose you're right and I imagine our "little" community is bigger than I had assumed.

 

ekert

Starting to Get Obsessed
Mar 26, 2018
171
29
Your calculations are based on Smokingpipes having the full allocation of 8000 tins. Of the full run of 8000 it's my understanding that 6000 are slated for the US market. I've read that 4nogggins, tobaccopipes, and country squire have these in stock and there may be more vendors out there. Assuming half the US allocation went to smokingpipes, that's only 120 orders of people ordering the max allowed which really isn't that much.

 
Jan 28, 2018
12,952
134,578
66
Sarasota, FL
timt, it's not just our little community here. There's a big world of pipe smokers out there (well, not that big really) that have never heard of pipesmagazine and don't really care about discussing pipe smoking on the internet. They just buy pipes and tobacco and smoke. Also, there are multiple other pipe smoking forum, similar to this one, that are talking about buying C&D Carolina Red VA Flake just like we are. And many more than people think that just lurk and never post. When you consider all that, kind of amazing they didn't sell out in less than 2 hours.

 

timt

Lifer
Jul 19, 2018
2,844
22,729
it's not just our little community here. There's a big world of pipe smokers out there (well, not that big really) that have never heard of pipesmagazine and don't really care about discussing pipe smoking on the internet.

What!!? Well, ok I'll accept that as a possibility. Seriously though, I didn't think SP would set a limit that high (25) if they thought it would sell out that fast. I could be wrong - it's happened before.

 
Jan 28, 2018
12,952
134,578
66
Sarasota, FL
If you consider it from their point of the view, the most profitable thing possible would be to sell all 8,000 to one Customer. I admit I was a bit surprised to see it set that high but with 8,000 tins, I would have been surprised to see it set at 5 for example. That would be 1,600 packages they'd have to ship out in a couple of days. Given they pre announced when it would be available, if someone didn't get some, they have nobody but themselves to blame.

 

swilford

Starting to Get Obsessed
May 30, 2010
208
730
Longs, SC
corporate.laudisi.com
If you consider it from their point of the view, the most profitable thing possible would be to sell all 8,000 to one Customer. I admit I was a bit surprised to see it set that high but with 8,000 tins, I would have been surprised to see it set at 5 for example. That would be 1,600 packages they'd have to ship out in a couple of days. Given they pre announced when it would be available, if someone didn't get some, they have nobody but themselves to blame.
Mostly in setting the limits we're trying to balance getting it to as many people as want it against inconveniencing people unnecessarily. At a limit of 25, moving it down a bit doesn't really make that much difference: very few people are buying that much (so, say, moving the limit from 25 to 20 would have only freed up about 100 tins). The limit just exists to keep people from buying truly huge chunks, which would screw up availability for others.
Different per order limits serve very different purposes, both in obvious ways--capping out big orders--and in non-obvious ways based on how the order counts are distributed. So, for example, on Penzance at limit 1 or 2, that is lower than what the average person would buy given no restrictions, but a limit of anything over about 8 is well above median and mean count per order. In the first case, it changes almost all behavior. In the second, it just serves to eliminate statistical outliers which can nonetheless affect things because they can be so big.
Just for fun on CRF yesterday:
Mean CRF tins/customer: 5.32

Median CRF tins/customer: 3

Mode CRF tins/customer: 2
(Other popular quantities (50+ orders per), in descending order of frequency: 1,3,10,4)
And for anyone actually trying to work the math backwards, Smokingpipes had a big chunk, but that 8,000 number for the run was global. 6,000 for the US market; 2,000 for other markets. Smokingpipes was just a part of that 6,000 (so, no, we didn't have 1,500 orders with CRF yesterday at Smokingpipes).
Oh, and for the record, everything received before about 4:30pm yesterday shipped same day...it was a busy day in the warehouse, but we knew in advance that it would be, so it wasn't hard to organize and schedule around it.
Sykes

 

Civil War

Lifer
Mar 6, 2018
1,552
396
Sykes, thanks for the info/transparency, its an interesting peak behind the scenes. I initially would have thought that the mean/median of the orders of CRF would have been larger. Good to know. Thanks!

 
The limit just exists to keep people from buying truly huge chunks, which would screw up availability for others.

I'm sorry...

67816-58229.jpg


 

swilford

Starting to Get Obsessed
May 30, 2010
208
730
Longs, SC
corporate.laudisi.com
Sykes, thanks for the info/transparency, its an interesting peak behind the scenes. I initially would have thought that the mean/median of the orders of CRF would have been larger. Good to know. Thanks!
Before I started looking at this sort of data--which is only in the past couple of years because these sorts of events are much more frequent than they once were--I made the same assumption you did. Probably because I assumed more people bought tobacco in sort of the same ways I do (which is more akin to what a lot of people in this forum do).
For all the data analysis we do at Laudisi, the biggest takeaway is always that different people do this pipe and tobacco thing differently. There's huge divergence in people's approach to the hobby. I think that's kinda cool. Of course there are other patterns (we wouldn't bother otherwise), but we always try to temper our decision making from that data with the understanding that averages hide a whole lot of variance.
I'm going to stop now before I start sounding like the Nate Silver of pipes...
Sykes

 
May 8, 2017
1,593
1,627
Sugar Grove, IL, USA
It’s interesting how the psychology of purchasing is affected by limited availability, which in the case of pipe tobacco, is further complicated by the FDA deeming rules which could conceivably make this the final release of this blend. Absent those factors, I would have bought a tin locally or ordered one tin with my next smokingpipes.com order. If I had liked it, would have added a couple more tins to my next order to put in my cellar for aging. However, with the limited release and FDA issues in play, I hedged my bet, gambling that I will really like it. So, I ordered five tins — the median. Of course, being halfway to free shipping, it doesn’t really make sense to pay $10 for shipping, so I added some other tins to push the total over $95. And that’s why my cellar overfloweth.
The questions that I keep asking myself are, “What will happen to pipe tobacco sales after the FDA deeming rules actually go into effect and the post 2007 tobacco blends are gone? How will that change the psychology of tobacco purchases?”

 
Jan 28, 2018
12,952
134,578
66
Sarasota, FL
“What will happen to pipe tobacco sales after the FDA deeming rules actually go into effect and the post 2007 tobacco blends are gone? How will that change the psychology of tobacco purchases?”
There will be a number of people that come on and post "What happened to [fill in the blank] blend?" having not paid any attention to the warning for 5 years or longer. Others will bitch about it. A lot will have purchased and stored more than they'll ever need. And then there will be even more fleaBay sales at huge prices for blends no longer available.

 

exbenedict

Starting to Get Obsessed
Feb 6, 2018
122
41
well, this is the first time I have had this particular blend, so I only bought 4. Figured I'd crack a tin when it shows up, and if it doesn't fit my palate then three tins are easy to offload, and if I like it, cellar 3 up for a year or two.

 
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