This is the cigars business now. It seems that plenty of retailers like to gouge customers and mark things up. I don't know what the profit margins on cigars usually are but for I do know that for many retailers it's a tough business. I can understand smaller outfits trying to make guaranteed profits and high margins where they can. I don't condone it, as that defeats the point of having MSRP pricing in the first place, but a retailer can sell things for whatever they want. I simply won't support those businesses or ever recommend that anybody purchase from them. It seems like cigar king does very well and doesn't need to do this sort of thing, but I highly doubt that they give two shits about what some yahoos on a cigar forum think of what they do.
I made a post a few months ago about a local retailer that marked the UF-13 up to over double the MSRP price. I posted about it on here and there was some flack and Saka himself posted that he would find out about it. He contacted the store and was told that all profits would be donated to their charity. That's absolutely awesome, but it was fishy that nothing was posted up or said about profits being donated at the actual store. It seems like that was more of reaction to catching some heat about what they were doing and then decided to donate profits in the wake of a problem. Either way, I'm glad the money went to a good and noteworthy cause. In the wake of this incident, I'm becoming more relaxed about over retail pricing because there is really and truly nothing that can be done about retailers gouging customers.
Having said all that, I would love to see a CK response to this or a quote from Pete or a Tat rep but I doubt that we'll be that lucky.