The finest American Spirit cigarettes are $75 a carton and the cheapest generic brands are $25 a carton in Missouri.
So three $75 cartons a month is about $225 times 12 or $2,700, or a third that at $75 a month times 12 equals $850 for the cheapies.
You can roll your own with $12 a pound cheap pipe tobacco, and save a lot. There are approximately 7.300 cigarettes a year smoked by a pack a day smoker. A pound of cheap $12 “pipe” tobacco makes about 450 cigarettes. Bugler papers are $30 per case of 24 115 packs. For $204 you buy 17 pounds of tobacco and $90 buys over 8,000 papers. You can smoke a pack a day for less than a dollar.
Premium pipe tobacco costs at least a dollar an ounce and the tiny two ounce cans often cost eight dollars an ounce.
I can load almost 10 grams in my huge Preben Holm Ben Wade Matt Special and my smallest Lee pear shapes hold two grams. Let’s put the average at three or four.
Bought in quantity almost every mail order blend without Latakia or Virgina is about two dollars an ounce. Good examples are all the Lane and Sutliff blends online.
If you smoke all day, every day, you might burn up two pounds a month. The cheapest you’ll get off is about $34 for the bottom shelf brands, Double that for the average mail order blend. You could spend over fifty a week on those little cans of ultra premium tobacco.
But in fifty years of smoking I’ve decided God never subtracts money spent on tobacco from your lifetime pile of winnings.
The Missouri minimum wage is $12 an hour. One hour buys an entire pound of cheap pipe tobacco.
Years ago I bought a 1907 copyright book at a thrift store that is sort of a one volume encyclopedia and a manual for everyday life, with various information about a wide range of subjects.
It’s filled with wise sayings and humorous jokes.
One was, that an elderly man was watching a brand new commercial building being constructed while smoking a cigar. A young man came up, and the old man offered him a cigar.
The young man declined, but asked him, how many of this cigars do you smoke a day?
Oh, about six, I suppose.
And how much do they cost, asked the young man?
A quarter each, was the reply.
And how many years have you smoked those cigars, the young man asked.
Almost forty five years the old man said.
The young man did some figuring and then said to the old man, if you’d not smoked and saved $1.50 a day and put it on interest at a sound bank, for forty five years, do you realize you could own that new commercial building going up, with money to spare?
The old man smiled and said, I do own that building, young man.
And, the rest of the block.