Thompson Cigar

Full review
Thompson Cigar Company can be a confusing experience is you don't know what you're looking for. With well over 50 "house" brands, interspersed in their catalog with the national brands, there are a lot of options.

The sampler packs are a good way to go, whether you get the Thompson Samplers, or Samplers comprised of national brands. It gives you a low cost opportunity to experiment with several different cigars.

One of their offerings as of this writing is a sampler of House brands, 30 cigars for $ 29.00. I got it, it arrived quickly, well packed and I even received a phone call from Customer Service to inform me that it had shipped, and to see if they could do anything else for me. Actually, the call was good to receive be cause they had an unadvertised special on a humidor that I was planning to buy anyway, so that phone call saved me about $ 30.00 on something I was planning on buying anyway.

About the sampler, it contained 5 of their house brands. Of them, 2 were good, two were ok, and one was, well, not so good. I gave those to my boss as a gift. :-)

Be that as it may, 25 of the 30 cigars were good, and it was a good deal.

I wish they had better descriptions of their house brands so you could make a more informed ordering choice. As it is, the selection is hit or miss until you find one that you like.

The national brands are average priced, some can be found elsewhere for less. When shipping is added in, you can probably buy the national brands for less at your local shop.

All in all, be cautious choosing the house brands. Make careful selections. Their web site does have a lot of helpful information and is fairly easy to navigate, which should help. Their "premium" house brands are all fairly good, but their standard house brands are hit or miss. Once you find one that's good, like the Phoenix or the Soccoro, make a note of it because the pricing can't be beat.

Some of the comments about the customer service surprise me, because I have had nothing but good experiences with them.