I'm a smoker, so is my wife, my sister, my father-in-law, my mother, my boss and some of my co-workers. Why do I mention this? Well because for a while every time I sat and spoke with anyone of these fellow smokers that I am also very close to, we always winced and whined about the price of cigarettes. It came to the point were if you are a pack a day smoker in Springfield, Illinois (that's where me and my loved ones are from by the way) it would cost you $70 dollars a week to keep smoking. That's $280 dollars a month, $3360 a year. I just couldn't afford it, we tried quitting but it just didn't work so we had to find an alternative.
I started off on a crusade to find my and my loved ones favorite brands (respectively) at a logical price. I created this blog as I thought my results might be beneficial for other fellow smokers out there, so here you go.
My first attempt at saving some money on cigs was to drive to Indiana to purchase my smokes, which although they sell for about half the price it also takes about three hours to get to the state line. So I was saving cig money and putting it into my gas tank, after doing some math I found that driving to Indiana actually cost more overall than buying locally, so that was the end of the Indiana connection. I later found out it is actually illegal to carry more than a couple of cartons (its roughly defined as what can be deemed personal use) across state lines. Due to the fact that I was purchasing for friends and family I was usually caring upwards of 16 to 20 cartons, so I was basically bootlegging cigarettes without even knowing it for a few months.
So after mistakenly dabbling in the illegal distribution of cigarettes I decided to take my crusade online. After multiple nights of searching reviews and websites, calling customer service lines and sending emails I would find a website that I felt relatively comfortable ordering with. The way I ordered initially though to test out the services was; I opened a separate checking account with online access so I can transfer only the specific amount of money needed for the purchase (in case any of them tried to charge more than the amount) and then I placed an order for one carton of their cheapest stuff (which my father-in-law smokes happily anyway) checked the payment method, most website accept credit card or e-check (which is just a regular check that is processed online). Finally I would see how long it would take the cigarettes to arrive, what condition they came in and if they were smokable (if anything that should be a given if your buying cigarettes, but to me and my father-inlaw's coughing chagrin its not).
