Cigar Lounge locker rentals - are they really worth it?

A few weeks ago, I ran a poll on my cigar blog asking if consumers rented lockers at their local cigar shops/lounges and the majority of people that responded - 82%, indicated that they did not. This percentage did not surprise me as I myself do not rent a locker because I don't see the purpose of doing so.

Most lounge's policy is to charge a yearly fee for the cigar smoker to rent a locker to store cigars in. In most cases the lounge requires that you can only store cigars that are purchased in that particular lounge. I feel that is just wasting money as you are just buying cigars and putting them in a locker and paying a yearly fee to do that. The cigars in your local lounge are already stored in a humidor (usually a walk-in one) and you can go and select whatever cigar you want and just pay for what you will smoke. Now if I could store overflow stock of my own cigars in a rented locker, then that would be a benefit to me. I would have extra storage and I could have cigars in the locker that maybe the shop doesn't carry. I do understand the lounge's point of view not to allow this because renters could just purchase cigars elsewhere - like online and store them in the locker and smoke those cigars ;instead of purchasing cigars from the shop/lounge itself. In that case, I would charge a higher rental fee and make a one cigar minimum purchase for each visit. Perhaps if the lounge is a membership-only and the locker price is factored into the membership for the lounge, then I think that this policy would have a better chance of working.

This of course is my own personal humble opinion, but as the poll on my blog indicated, I am not the only one that feels that renting a locker is not really worth the extra money.