Anstead’s Cigar Barn opens on Rogers Branch Road

A cigar shop from Fayetteville has opened on Rogers Branch Road, and it is the fourth store for a family tobacco business that has been running since 1975. Anstead’s Cigar Barn is at 3605 Rogers Branch Road, Suite 106, and the company’s own locations page lists it as open with an outdoor patio lounge.

The Wake Forest store showed up on the town’s permit list in August. That list tells you a building permit was issued, not that a business is serving customers, which is why we waited. The company now says the doors are open.

What Anstead’s is

The business started in Fayetteville in 1975 and still runs its flagship there at 320 N. McPherson Church Road, a store it calls the Big Red Barn. That is the full-size version: open until 10 p.m. on weekdays and open on Sundays, which for a tobacco retailer means it functions as a destination rather than a stop.

The other three stores, including Wake Forest, are the Cigar Barn format. The company describes these as grab-and-go, which in this trade means a walk-in humidor, a counter, and a curated wall rather than the full lounge-and-event operation the flagship runs.

The Wake Forest store is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and closed Sunday. The phone number is not published on the locations page, so call ahead is hard advice to follow here. Our suggestion: check the company’s site before a long drive, because the hours on aggregator listings for a brand new store are usually wrong for the first month.

The patio lounge is the detail that separates this from a gas station humidor. An outdoor seating area attached to a cigar shop means people are meant to stay, and that changes what kind of business it is on a Thursday evening.

The company lists two more locations as coming. Four open stores and two in the pipeline is a real expansion for a business of this size, and Wake Forest is the northern end of it.

Rogers Branch Road is turning into something

3605 Rogers Branch Road is worth looking at as an address rather than a storefront, because the same building is filling up fast.

Anstead’s took Suite 106. Suite 104 in the same building was permitted for https://wakeforestmagazine.com/directory/barre3-wake-forest/, a barre fitness studio. That is a cigar shop and a fitness studio sharing a wall, which is either a joke about Wake Forest’s demographics or a sign that the landlord will lease to anyone with a deposit. Probably both.

Rogers Branch sits off Capital Boulevard on the south side of town, in the stretch of light industrial and flex space that has been quietly converting to retail and service tenants. It is not a destination corridor and it is not trying to be. It is where a business goes when it wants Wake Forest customers without downtown rent.

It is also not the first thing to land there this year. An indoor golf club with six Trackman bays and a putting green is going into the same corridor. A cigar shop, a barre studio and a simulator golf club inside a few hundred yards of each other is a fairly specific picture of who the landlords think lives nearby.

The road is also about to get a lot more attention for a different reason. NCDOT is building a $57 million railroad grade separation at Rogers Road, which is a different road but the same general problem: this side of town is where Wake Forest’s traffic and its growth are colliding. Anything that opens here now is opening in front of several years of construction.

Whether Wake Forest supports this

The honest market question is whether the town has the customer base for a dedicated cigar retailer, and the search data gives a partial answer.

Nobody in Wake Forest searches for a local cigar shop. The term has effectively no volume. But “cigar lounge Raleigh NC” runs about 210 searches a month at low competitive difficulty, which says the demand exists in the metro and is currently being served closer to Raleigh. A shop on Rogers Branch is a twenty-minute drive from north Raleigh and a five-minute drive from Heritage.

Anstead’s also already knows this market. The Garner store has been running on Timber Drive, which is the other side of Wake County, so the company has tested whether a Cigar Barn works in a Raleigh suburb before putting one here.

Our read: the patio is the business. A walk-in humidor competes with the internet on price and loses. A place where four people can sit outside on a Friday with something they bought inside does not have an online equivalent, and that is the part worth watching.

What we know and what we do not

We have the address, the suite, the hours, the company’s history and its other locations, all from the company’s own published pages. Those are the facts in this article.

We do not know who manages the Wake Forest store, how large the humidor is, what the patio seats, whether there is a membership or locker program, or whether the store will hold events the way the Fayetteville flagship does. None of that is published, and we are not going to guess at it.

We also do not have a phone number for this location, which is unusual and probably temporary.

What we can say is that the permit-to-open gap here was short. The store appeared on the August permit list and the company is already calling it open in September, which is fast for a retail buildout and suggests the space needed very little work. That is one of the arguments for this kind of flex building: a tenant can be trading inside a few weeks instead of a few quarters.

It is also worth noting what this opening is not. It is not a downtown business, it does not add foot traffic to White Street, and it will not show up in any of the conversations the town is having about its historic district. Rogers Branch is a different Wake Forest, the one that is filling in along Capital Boulevard with businesses that need a door and a parking space and not much else. Most of the town’s actual commercial growth is happening out there, and it gets a fraction of the attention downtown does.

https://wakeforestmagazine.com/directory/ansteads-cigar-barn/ is now in our directory as a verified open business, based on the company listing the store as open with posted hours. If you get there and the hours are different, that is the sort of correction we want.

One practical note for anyone going: this is a tobacco retailer, so expect to show identification, and North Carolina law puts the minimum age at 21.