TOB Magazine

36 / 55

Y ou might just miss B&B To-
bacconists as you drive the
winding, narrow lanes of Mer-
rimon Avenue in Asheville, North Caro-
lina, mostly because you’ll need to keep
your eyes on the road while cruising this
busy thoroughfare that carves its way
through the city nestled in the beautiful
Blue Ridge Mountains. But then you’d
miss out on this Southern oasis for cigar
smokers, a bit of old school amidst the
burgeoning hipster cool that’s spreading
there like kudzu.
B&B Tobacconists began life as
Bruce’s Pipe Shop in 1979, when Bruce
Barnes retired at age 71 from the radio
advertising business. David Barnes, his
son and now sole owner of the shop, tells
of the time he came home from work,
about six months after his father had re-
tired, to find his father and brother sit-
ting around a kitchen table covered with
white envelopes and piles of tobacco.
As Barnes tells it, “I said, ‘What’s going
on here?’”His father answered,“I’m bored,
I’m going to start a pipe shop.” It might
come as no surprise that Bruce Barnes had
a reputation as a straight shooter, and that
goes a long way in North Carolina. From
the kitchen table, the shop opened in an
old roadside motel that had been con-
verted into stores. It prospered there until
1984, when it moved just up the road to
its present location, a charming 90-year-
old house with rocking chairs lined up on
the front porch.
In the early days, it was the pipe tobac-
co business that kept the doors open; sell-
ing cigars was more of an afterthought, a
way to separate the shop from another
one in the area. “In fact, when my dad
first opened they didn’t have cigars at all,”
says Barnes. “I kind of talked him into
it because I thought people were looking
for started with General Cigar,
J.C. Newman and Fuente.Those were the
three companies he dealt with for a very
long time.”
To step inside the shop today is to cross
over into another time. The living room
area is filled with leather and upholstered
chairs, an old phonograph and a wall full
of vinyl LPs that run the gamut fromSina-
tra to Country music.There are two main
rooms where smokers can light up and ex-
change their views on the world, speaking
with a mixture of the gliding vowels that
distinguish the Southern drawl, and the
pace of life seems to slow to a crawl.
Visitors will be glad that B&B To-
bacconists, as it’s now known, has been
here for so long: it’s the only place in
Buncombe County where cigar lov-
ers can smoke inside, thanks to it being
grandfathered in when the laws changed.
That’s an important detail, because Da-
vid Barnes was an agent for 40 years for
the North Carolina State Bureau of In-
vestigation and is not one to flout the law.
EVOLVING WITH THE MAR-
KET
Over the years, the business shifted from
pipe tobacco to predominantly cigars.
“Most of our pipe smokers are not cigar
smokers,” says Barnes. “Mostly the pipe
smokers here are the older folks—in their
40s and up. And we’re not a shop that ca-
Tobacco Road:
AnOasis in Asheville
Once known as Bruce’s Pipe Shop, B&B Tobacconists is now a thriving North Carolina cigar shop.
By Peter Barry
66
TOBACCO BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016
TRENCH MARKETING SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016