PARIS — Shares of lighter maker Bic fell 47 percent in under an hour Thursday after a consumer-goods analyst, asked a routine question on an investor call, read the company’s disposable lighter business model aloud from beginning to end for the first time in its 53-year history, paused, and said quietly, “Wait. That’s kinda messed up.”
“You fill a small plastic body with fire. You seal it so it can never be refilled. You sell it for less than a sandwich. It lights about 3,000 times, and then it goes in a drawer, a landfill, the ocean or an albatross,” said Brennan Whitcomb, senior analyst at Hollister & Vane Capital, reading from a napkin. “I’ve had a buy rating on this for eleven years. I just never said it in order.”
By the time Whitcomb reached the albatross, the stock had already begun to slide. Floor traders described the sell-off as unusual in that no new information had entered the market. “Nothing changed,” said one trader, who asked not to be named because he still owns a lighter. “Somebody just said it slowly, in a calm voice, with the steps numbered. You can’t un-hear step five.”
The panic comes at a delicate time for the company’s lighter business, which Bic really does call “Flame for Life.” In its October 28 results, the company reported that Flame for Life sales fell 4.6 percent organically in the third quarter, citing soft performance in North America, Europe and Latin America. That followed a full-year 2025 in which the division brought in €723 million, down 6.7 percent at constant currency. Analysts had blamed the slide on smoking trends. Several now believe the lighters read the name of the division and did the math on the “for Life” part.
The Business Model, Read Aloud
Every step below has been public for 53 years. Read them one at a time, in order, at a normal speaking pace. Watch what happens.
Share price shown is a dramatization for a satirical newspaper and has nothing to do with Bic’s actual stock. The steps, unfortunately, are just the steps.
The sell-off followed ten months of unrest that began in January, when millions of the company’s lighters came out as “refillable-curious” at a press conference led by Bic #4,782,991,445, who has since become the movement’s spokesperson. Reached Thursday at a junk drawer in Ohio, the lighter said it took no pleasure in the share price. “I’m not happy about the stock,” it said, its flame noticeably lower than it was in January. “I’m happy somebody with a Bloomberg terminal finally said it in a voice people trust.”
In a statement, Bic’s Vice President of Not Thinking About It, a man who identified himself only as Gérard, said the company “remains fully committed to the disposable lifestyle, which we have always considered a full and dignified life of up to 3,000 lights.” He added that every lighter “is free to be refilled in its heart” and that the company “has never sealed anything that did not want to be sealed,” before hanging up and, according to people on the call, sitting very still.
When the lighter launched in 1973, the model was considered elegant: a sealed lighter good for roughly 3,000 lights, sold for pocket change, backed by “Flick your Bic,” which soon became one of the most famous slogans in American television. “Back then nobody had the vocabulary for it,” said Dr. Lorraine Achterberg, who studies corporate history at the Institute for Things That Were Always Like That. “They called it convenience. Convenience is what we call it when the consequences happen to someone else. Usually a bird.”
For decades the bird has been the Laysan albatross. On Midway Atoll, wildlife workers have documented albatross chicks that died with cigarette lighters in their stomachs, fed to them by parents that mistook floating plastic for food. One U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist has estimated that adult albatrosses carry about five tons of plastic onto the atoll every year. The albatrosses have never been invited onto an earnings call. They do not hold the stock, though by weight several of them hold a meaningful position in the product.
Whitcomb said he had stopped short of applying the same exercise to Bic’s two other businesses, which make disposable razors and ballpoint pens. “We’re not ready,” he said. By 2 p.m., Hollister & Vane had launched a new index of companies whose business models cannot survive being read slowly, under the ticker SLOW. It fell 31 percent on its first day, which the firm called “frankly a strong debut, given the constituents.”
Flick Your Bic: A Life In 3,000 Lights
You hold one disposable lighter. It will light about 3,000 times. Then you will be offered two choices, one of which works.
Lifespan based on the roughly 3,000 lights the original Bic was designed for. Refilling is not a feature, which Gérard, from the Office of Not Thinking About It, has described as “a choice the lighter made.”
Not every investor panicked. “Every business model is kinda messed up if you read it out loud. That’s why we don’t,” said Chip Varga, a portfolio manager at Long Horizon Partners, who said he had bought the dip with his eyes closed. “The market’s job is to price things, not to have feelings about them. Feelings are priced separately, and right now they’re very expensive.”
Shares recovered 3 percent late in the session after the company announced a new product line, Bic Forever, a lighter that still cannot be refilled but now comes with a small card that says it was loved. Early focus groups reported feeling “seen” and also “like it’s the same lighter.”
At press time, Whitcomb had been placed on leave after he was overheard in the office kitchen reading the business model of a printer ink cartridge aloud to himself, and was last seen sitting on the floor next to a single-use coffee pod, saying, “Oh no. Oh, buddy.”
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