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If you’re going to smoke, save money on cigarettes
By Mr. Stupid | April 8, 2008
I have alot of little vices. I like to play poker, I like to eat cheese, I play Desktop Tower Defense when I should be working… and I like to smoke cigarettes. OK, that last one is not a little vice. It’s a big vice. And it can also be very expensive to do.
At the two convenience stores nearest to my house, a pack of Camel Lights is $4.98 and $5.49. When I asked one of the proprietors how much a carton would be, he said I could have one for $50 (actually, he said “I can give you $50″, which I took to mean it would cost me $50.). So I’ll put the average price of a pack of cigarettes at $5.00.
If you smoke a pack a day (I don’t smoke that much, but it seems like a good rule of thumb to use for this discussion), then you’re spending $1,825 per year on cigarettes (or $1,830 per year during leap years).
You can reduce the cost of a pack of cigarettes by as much as 77% — without ordering them online, without driving to a reservation, and without buying cartons off the back of a truck. You do this by rolling your own.
To roll your own, you need a cigarette machine, tobacco, and rolling tubes. You could also use rolling papers, but that’s harder, takes more time, and the results are not as consistent. With a machine, it’s easy, once you know how.
The machine I use is made by Top. It’s plastic with a metal “spoon”, and it’s made in America. Actually, the box says “Made in America”, but on the bottom of the machine, it says “Made in China”. I guess the box was made in America. Hooray for us!
The machine is called a hand injector. You load in a pinch of tobacco, tamp it down, and then the machine “shoves” the tobacco into a pre-rolled tube. The hardest part of rolling your own is learning how. I’ve made a video showing you how:
Top makes a couple of different hand injectors. The larger one I tried is actually worse at making cigarettes. It tends to tear the tubes when you use it too vigorously.
The initial cost of the machine I use is $8.49 + tax. Those machines usually come with about 50 tubes and a few ounces of tobacco for you to practice on. Buying this machine is an occasional cost. I have been rolling my own for 5 years or so, and have had to buy 3 machines during that time.
The recurring costs involved in rolling yer own are as follows:
- Bag of tobacco. I buy Gambler Light tobacco, which is $7.99 + tax for 6 ounces. This is enough to roll about 200 cigarettes.
- 1 carton of pre-rolled, pre-filtered tubes (200 tubes per carton). I buy 200 Gambler Light tubes for $3.49 + tax.
The tobacco and the tubes come with complementary coupons, which reduces the cost by $.70. So the total, including tax, is $11.32, for 200 cigarettes, or 10 packs.
Divide $11.32 by 10, and you come out to about $1.13 per pack. That is an annual savings of $1,412.55.
Smoke up, johnny!
One last tip; if you buy a bag of tobacco that turns out to be a little dry, or you keep it for a long time and it dries out, you can put in a piece of an orange rind into the bag. It will re-moisten the tobacco. Use a small piece, about 4 inches square or so, and leave it in for a day or two, maybe moving it around a few times, and then remove. It won’t affect the flavor of the tobacco much, but will give it a whiff of orange.
Topics: hacks |
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April 8th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Smoking is bad for you! or so I’ve heard. :)
Can you change your feed to output the full version? That would be much more convenient.
Mike