Premiums
The tobacco trade of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries flourished despite pirates, smugglers, taxation, adulteration, and high prices. Smokers, chewers, and snuffers happily consumed as much as they could afford and blue laws would permit.
Bulk ropes, twists, and slabs of tobacco dominated trade, with local merchants or the users themselves converting it to useable form as snuff or pipe tobacco. Cigarettes (such as they were) were almost entirely used by Cuban women and peasants and only in Spanish colonies were cigars smoked in any quantities.
But the 1800’s witnessed a change. Cuba was officially opened, spreading cigars to the world which responded with huge orders outstripping the Island’s ability to produce. The Crimean War helped spread tiny-leafed Middle-Eastern tobacco which was used to make pungent distinctive cigarettes. The US Civil War raised demand for new strains of easily flavored Southern tobacco used in pipes and for chewing. Demand for tobacco became overwhelming, especially from the growing urban middle class.
Railroads, canals, and bigger, faster more reliable merchant ships made it possible to meet that demand. Supply, demand, production, wealth to be made and spent...all adds up to competition. And in the world of consumer tobacco products, getting an edge quickly meant using freebies.
The wonderful half century of American expansion and creativity between the Civil War and World War One (1865-1915) witnessed an all-out no-holds-barred battle for supremacy among and between cigarette companies and the makers of smoking and chewing tobacco. Hundreds of companies were involved in that war; less than a dozen survived it.
The weapons in that titanic economic struggle were advertising, price cutting and premiums. During those decades hundreds of millions of trinkets, cards, buttons, pins, coupons and a long list of other items were given away as a thank-you to retailers for carrying a particular product, to smokers for trying a particular product and to dedicated smokers for long-term use of the product.
Four types of premium remain especially note-worthy more than 100 years later because smokers and non-smokers alike still seek them... and in some cases, pay surprising prices for them: tin tags, insert cards, textiles and buttons.
As you can see from the eighteen exhibit links at left, in Hyman’s National Cigar Museum there is a lot more to tobacco premiums than the big four. Enjoy.
tony hyman
