Ok! Here's What Happened!

On Aug. 11, 2008, Clints cigars was hit by what can only be described as a tsunami of requests for samples. At first we were just puzzled. This soon gave way to wonderment, and finally a dash of "what the hell do we do about this". Everyone frantically searched for their cell phone.

Was this a malfunction?
Was it just spam?
No!....it's.....it's.....it's bloggers.

It seems that someone or something had picked up on our "free sample" offer (a villainous act, we suspected) and decided to post it across the entire planet. Even though our sample order form had "U.S. only" clearly indicated, we had orders from across America, many foreign countries on 4 continents.

Somehow our offer of free samples, which until this day had seemed like a good idea, suddenly had us wondering if we had created a monster. There weren't just dozens, not hundreds, not even thousands, but many, many thousands from all over the globe. Around 30 thousand......... Errr........thereabouts.

Are you beginning to get the picture?

None of us here at Clints, nor even the company who manages our web site, ever imagined that what we thought was a sincere free offer would result in torrent of response. Our web site was overwhelmed, it overheated and it crashed.

Now we are a Florida corporation, legal and all and we're proud to be somewhere in fortunes list of top 100,000 business's (barely). We have a total staff of 3 + 1 pt/as needed. We all earn our living trying to bring to the market a really good cigar (just the one) while providing our customers service with a down home feel. We were now wondering what to do about this.

We are far from having the resources for sending out anything like 30,000 free samples. We couldn't even cover the postage and packaging.
It's also crystal clear that we can't just offer anything free ever again.

So now we're offering a sample that can be free if the customer decides to make it so. Please look back on our home page for the new offer.

We're also going to honor all the requests that weren't lost and were complete and age verified. It will take some time and so we're asking for your patience. It may take us a while but you will get your sample, eventually. We're going to just keep on keeping on so to speak.

We sincerely apologize to all those whose orders were lost and hope it won't cause you any inconvenience. We think we've learned a valuable lesson here.

Thanks for reading our explanation.........now we're going back to just making the one cigar.

Sincerely, the Clints crew.
Tim, Kathy, Carol, Shirley aka Chica