A Day in the Life of a Retail Assistant #62 
Hello everyone! How are you all doing? We have had some incredible weather in Norfolk! Some days have been really hot, other days it has been raining all day! But that hasn’t stopped our loyal customers from coming in and buying their favourite smokes!
So what has been going on this week?
On Monday, It was Josh and I working in the shop and picking the mountains of online orders! Josh has been impressing so much recently that he is now working full time! So there are more opportunities for you all to meet him and have a lovely chat all about cigars. I also served a lovely lady who was buying a few cigars for her husband when he got back from travelling. He used to have Cuban cigars, however due to the price of them in the UK, he recently changed to New World cigars. Unfortunately due to the change, the lady didn’t know what to get him, she just wanted three good cigars for a decent price. This is a specialty of mine as one big consideration for me when buying cigars is the price. She went away very happy with a Regius Serie Limitada Robusto, Aladino Corojo Robusto and the Alec Bradley Orchant Seleccion Shorty. Once we finished our pickings, we went around restocking the humidors, ready for the rest of the week.
On Tuesday, I was back in the shop with Ciaran. After our pickings, we started cleaning the pipe room, polishing the metal on the pipes as well as stocking up. Everyday we seem to have new pipes on our website and some of them look incredible. I particularly like the Vauen pipes, they are not just your standard pipe, most of them look unique, but also create a cool smoke.
Thursday was my marketing day. I started off by researching for an article for the C.Gars cigar library, I then took part in our marketing meeting, which we have every two weeks. We discuss what has worked well as well as what we can improve on. We have combined together for an excellent idea which we are all working on, you will hopefully see the finished product soon. Between me and you though, it will be a game changer. After the meeting, I started writing my article. This week was a break from the lists as I wrote about Rattrays pipes and the history, you can read all about it here. Later that day we had a bit of fun – If you remember from a previous blog, we had a Euros sweepstake, I got Italy… Unlucky for me. Those whos teams were still in the tournament got to play some games to win prizes. They played table football with Malteasers as well as stacking towers out of marshmallows.
On Friday, It was Josh and myself again as it usually is on a Friday. I served a great gentleman who has been coming to the store a long time before I started working here. He used to have a supplier who would send him cigars from the US. However that person had to stop so now he can only buy a few from our store to keep him going. I also recommended the Mitchellero range as it is a bargain price for a hand rolled cigar! So he took two coronas as well as some CAOs and left happy. Later on that afternoon we had the Cuban stock take. I think Josh had an extra coffee as he was counting extremely fast! It was difficult for me to keep up sometimes.
On Saturday, myself, Josh and Porscha were running the shop. We got through the pickings and then got on with shop tasks. This included shuffling the Peterson pipes as they were in the wrong order! We like to organise them in an order that makes it easy for us to find as well as keeping all the different ranges together. So we went through all the Peterson pipes to put them in the correct order and re-stock the ones that needed to go out. Josh went through the humidors and wiped off any plume that could be seen. Many of you will know that plume is a good thing, however it doesn’t look particularly appetising, so we wipe it of so when you receive your cigar it is ready to be smoked. If you don’t know what plume is then I have an article you can read all about it, just click here.
I hope you have enjoyed this weeks going on and I hope to see you all in store very soon.
So long for now
Oliver
