Grand Theft Lighter

I’ve been ranting about this one for ages. I’m a smoker, so I almost have one or more lighter in my possession at ALL times. Even people that are not smokers keep lighters on hand for various things around the house. It’s estimated that most households have more than one lighter in it. I pulled all below amounts from reliable sources. I'm not about to put together a work cited document for my lighter rant, so you're just going to have to excuse my math and work with me here.

I’m a terrible lighter thief. I’ve gotten better over the years but my friends used to often tease me, saying if you’re missing a lighter it’s because the lighter is in MY pocket. It’s just very easy to borrow someone else’s lighter for a moment, and you keep it in your hand, toss it in your purse, or put it in your pocket as though it were your own. It’s almost muscle memory… especially for someone that uses a lighter multiple times daily.

So, those of you smokers… how many of you have stolen a lighter? How many have had lighters stolen from you? My point exactly. I have a hypothesis that lighters are the most stolen item in America. Some even change hands upwards of ten times. So… I’m going to make a rough estimate that lighters are stolen an average of five times. Some are stolen much more…. And some aren’t ever stolen at all, but I think five is a good medium.

The most popular lighter is the Bic Lighter… so I’m going to narrow my estimates down to Bic Lighters alone. About 60% of all lighters purchased from a convenience store are Bic Lighters. Now… Bic shipped about 1.2 billion lighters in 2009. We’ll go ahead and assume these were all sold, and to keep the math simple I am going to round to one billion. So, going off of my very rough estimate of five steals per lighter, that’s about five billion lighters stolen per year.

A trusty Bic is usually priced around two dollars each in most instances (2.19 at my nearest c-store). Given that information I’m going to say that total… collectively we will spend about two billion dollars on lighters in a year. If we are going to say each of these is stolen five times… that means that about ten billion dollars worth of lighters are stolen.

So, we have about five billion stolen lighters, adding up to about ten billion dollars total. Keep in mind… this is only counting Bic Lighters. So, this is only 60% of the actual deficit. So, really we’re looking at about nine billion thefts, accruing to 18 billion dollars of stolen goods.

Let’s put this amount in perspective.

There are typically, about a million cars stolen yearly and the most common stolen car is the Honda Civic (who knew?). A new Honda Civic is going to run you… about twelve grand. I am going to use that as a point of estimation and go ahead and assume that about fourteen billion dollars worth of cars are reported stolen annually. Collectively, this is about 4 billion dollars less than my (approximate) lighter deficit.

I guess more than anything this is just comical to me. I certainly wouldn’t suggest calling the local PD at two am to report your fancy new tattoo Bic pocketed, and I don’t want my tax dollars going to a lighter theft task force. Next time you light-up, look down at your lighter and take an extra two second to ensure the one you are putting in your pocket is your own. :)