Thoughts about pipe tobacco market

[Trenchfriend]

Since 2024, there was a remarkable price increase in pipe tobacco in Germany and probably whole EU.

I think, that's the end. That will finally kill the small leftover pipe smoker market. I wouldn't wonder, if more and more of the younger pipe friends finally quit, in the next years. And if not the price increase only does, then the anticipatable quality changes on old beloved tobaccos to lowering costs or even brands disappearing and the "big hunt" on smokers will do the rest.

MacBaren also now belongs to Swedish Tobacco Group, which doesn't have interest in the small number of pipe smokers.

 

[Bigsbycallaghan]

I recognize this is a few months late, but I got hit hard by that buyout too over here in the States. They had some good mixes coming out of the Seattle Pipe Club that are now being discontinued.
I ended up starting this thing last year where I bought whole leaf tobacco and recreated some of the blends making them into traditional tobacco naval twists. I've done about 30 by now.

 

[Edward]

TBH, there are so few of us left that I suspect the market dwindling is leading price rises more than anything else. My first pipe was bought for a tenner in a regular tobacconist. In the last decade to fifteen years, I've moved tobacconist three times as I had to go into the West End to find pipe specialists. Three of the four there once were have either closed or moved online. It's just a hobby that's dying out.

I suspect, too, that the business has more interest in other forms of tobacco and nicoteen consumption as they are simply more focused on alternatives whose users are a better guarantee of repeat custom. The few pipe smokers I know personally are all recreational and occasional. A cigarette smoker or a vaper who is feeding a regular need several times a week is likely a much more profitable target customer. Overall, though, I think it's just in the process of dying out irrespective of cost. It's increasingly rare for me to have students in my classes who are smokers - particularly among the undergraduates, and I'm even seeing vaping drop off in commonality out on the streets in London, compared to what it once was.

Funny how things change - I've recently been rewatching This Life, a BBC drama about a group of young, mid-twenty something mostly-lawyers living in London. It went out in 1996/97, and was set when it was made - a reasonable (if heightened because television) depiction of a lot of social norms of the era. Even the non-smokers have the occasional 'social' cigarette. That would have been around the time that Northern Ireland Railways as was got rid of the one-in-three smoking carriage (a practice introduced at a time when, statistically, one in three adults was a smoker), and then shortly thereafter also went smoke-free in stations (where it was possible to control it). This over a decade after the King's Cross fire (caused by a discarded cigarette). Early days of limits on where people could smoke starting to come in then, though still a decade or so before the overall smoking ban became law.

 

[Bigsbycallaghan]

I'd agree with many of your points. It's becoming an increasingly uncommon thing to be into in my anecdotal experience. I don't think I've ran into anyone in the past 10 years who smokes a pipe, other than the folks I either started with or onboarded.
Up in Alaska, the crew I fish with all smoke pipes, so I reckon it seems more common to me than it is in the general population. We've still got a couple good tobacco shops in Anchorage, but other than that it's all by mail.
Pricing isn't a problem over here in the US, but competition with Zyn is. Particularly for the "convenience" nicotine folks who don't care much for the process or tradition.
I wouldn't be surprised to see another uptick though. My money is on whenever the next good Lord of the Rings adaptation comes out!

 

[Edward]

I wouldn't be surprised to see another uptick though. My money is on whenever the next good Lord of the Rings adaptation comes out!

Could be. A lot of people I knew who took up the pipe back in the day were doing it as an alternative to cigarettes. The giving up cigarettes guides in those days all used to suggest trying a pipe or cigars instead... That market has of course gone to vaping now, largely, though maybe it'll swing back to pipes with all the new talk about popcorn lung and other issues with vaping.


A new Rings picture could well help, though it'll have to do well to stem the backlash Amazon's series got. (Which was unfair to a degree; it definitely played fast and loose with the source material, but having an obsessive fanbase, some of whom have never forgiven Peter Jackson for nixing Tom Bombadil, was perhaps to be expected.)

If only science could bring us a tobacco alternative that had all the plusses of the pipe, with the addition of health *benefits*! It's something I only light up every few months, but such a relaxing experience.