A look at box codes from 6 months of 24:24

[planetary]

FOH member zeedubbya and I were chatting the other day about box my video review spreadsheet, and got to talking about box codes. We have a lot of questions about them (as anyone who's been around the block long enough is bound to), but I got to thinking about what data we *do* have, and what insights we can glean.

Using summary data from someone (RL name I won't use here, but I don't know his FOH forum name!) who carefully tracks 24:24 sales, and has detailed data from July, 2015 until January, 2016, I've taken that data and run a few tables, charts, and graphs. I don't think this data is 100% complete, but it's got nearly 800 entries, so I'll take it.

I like this data source, because it only shows items which passed Rob's muster, which mean they met a bar of quality.

https://goo.gl/U9Dta4

Please look at all the different tabs at the bottom. There are quite a few! And scroll around, since some of the tables are quite big.

I've created tables for each brand, as well. We can see which box codes have appeared most frequently, and which production months were on offer most frequently, as well.

For each box code, I also calculated the date of earliest appearance, and the most recent appearance. Interestingly, some codes have been around (either continuously, or in cycles) for many years...

It's interesting to have this in hand. You can see, for example, that the HURR and HUPC on offer on the last two days, which have the LUB code, continue the strength of that code for the H. Upmann brand. And it turns out that it has been the 4th most commonly sold code in 24:24 over this period of time.

Anyway -- hope this is of interest. Perhaps we can poke at the data to find other insights and trends, as well.

[luv2fly]

I have never been a box code chaser until I smoked a ULA15 QD Corona the other day. Got the box from a 24:24. Put in the humi and pulled one out in honor of the recent 24:24.

I could not be happier with my box purchase and I am pissed I missed out on the offering. Now I may be a case chaser as far as those go. I hope they found a good home...

[planetary]

Thanks, Morgan. Credit to zeedubbya for asking questions about this topic (we didn't even touch on his *real* questions yet), and especially to our unnamed benefactor who did the heavy lifting with the data, month after month.

[luv2fly]

Planetary, thanks for your posts!!

[NSXCIGAR]

And the winner is...EML

[treberty]

This is really interesting. Thanks for the info!

[garbandz]

surprising that MUR does not appear,one of my all time favorite codes,lasted a good while and was reliable.........

[planetary]

And the winner is...EML

Yeah:

[IcedCanuck]

Thanks for putting it all together.

[Deodato]

Great data! Love it. Thanks man.

[ayepatz]

Fascinating. Great work, planetary!

[earthson]

You are my hero! I can only hope this becomes an annual event - I might begin chasing box codes again!

[wabashcr]

Very interesting analysis. Wish we could know how many boxes were available under each offering, but I certainly understand why we won't ever have access to that.

Thanks for putting it all together and sharing.

[Elvis]

Good stuff. Thanks very much!

[irratebass]

Damn! That had to take a lot of work.......very interesting, now how did you get all that info from the 24:24's since they disappear the next day....did you just screen save them all for your data? I mean seriously this took some work....thanks for sharing with us.

[Goose]

Brilliant - I am a bit of an excel nerd myself and had started doing the same exercise a week ago; more for my own purposes of being able to locate bargains/have a decent shot of picking out a winner. But I have to say this is fantastically meticulous and more insight than I was planning to gather.

[CUBANO]

Thanks for the good work

[nonameno]

Hi Planetary,

Very interesting information, and thank you so much for putting this together for all of us!

Thank you and best wishes,
Curtiss

[zeedubbya]

Here's the original questions I posed if anyone is interested. As I am a stats junkie like Planetary I believe with a little work we could maybe answer some of these questions. Keep in mind the factory codes used are just hypothetical examples and I have no basis for this line of thinking.

"Since you're into statistics and numbers so much and so adept at putting them together I have always wondered if it would be possible to crack the factory code. Not from a figuring out what factory the cigars actually came from, but during a certain time period and a certain factory code is there a statistically significant amount of boxes which get higher marks than others? I recently posted a topic on RAE Jun15 as being a good solid performer from what I've seen. I wonder if you took all available data from last couple years 24:24, forum members statements, Robs lists of great codes, and maybe another vendors factory code sheet and come up with a spreadsheet showing which factory code with month and year were better by larger margins? I'm assuming from this you'd find out certain trends in how the factory codes may have moved. For example maybe RAE from Feb-July 2015 was possibly the same factory as LUB from Sept.-December 2014. Or ULA could be same as AUM from certain time periods? Just a crazy thought since the days of chasing specific factories is over, maybe chasing trends is the way to go. Certainly it would make sense that the better staff at LUB late 2014-early 2015 could now be TOS late 2015, and thus one would have better luck getting these boxes than any others? Just food for thought from one numbers junkie to another! Let me know what you think."

[Dbone]

Good statical information. One other thing your report brought to mind was the amount of PSP being sold these days. 6, 7 years ago PSP was like a diamond in the rough, maybe a box, two, or three a month. It was common for LFTH or LITH to have none. Quality sure has increased. I say that from speculation only, I'm still smoking through my hoardings of 2008 through 2010's and probably will be for a few more years.

[planetary]

Good statical information. One other thing your report brought to mind was the amount of PSP being sold these days. 6, 7 years ago PSP was like a diamond in the rough, maybe a box, two, or three a month. It was common for LFTH or LITH to have none. Quality sure has increased. I say that from speculation only, I'm still smoking through my hoardings of 2008 through 2010's and probably will be for a few more years.

Interesting. Question for us newer folks -- what were LFTH and LITH? How did they work?

[SparklePony]

This is amazing information. Now I have a (second) hobby: going over this and finding false patterns!

[planetary]

This is amazing information. Now I have a (second) hobby: going over this and finding false patterns!

That's a fair point. Given the limits of the data (only what passed 24:24 standards), it's a leap to generalize this to overall quality. And it's also not clear that one can use this data to establish code-to-factory equivalencies, either.

[Bartolomeo]

Great info!

[JamesNYC]

Awesome stuff! Thanks for all your work.