Clove Cigarette Prices?

How much is the typical price for a carton of clove cigarettes in Indonesia?

My last records show in 2014 a small pack (12) of Gudang Garam International, a civilized filter variety, cost 11k or about US$1. Cheap enough to be able to hand them out in village situations without concern for cost. Tobacco taxes may well have increased since then.
enjoy while you can
omp

Depends what type of clove cigarettes as well as your location within Indonesia.

As a smoker (and a passion for kretek) here's what I can say.

Lucky Strike kretek ( formerly named Club Mild) comes in a lack of 16 sticks. Local cost is 14k, though I know some visitors pay maybe 16k per pack. Multiply by 10 packs for a full carton is between 140k and 160k. As someone who has travelled and lived in the country, and if buying a full carton of 10 packs at 14k per pack I would expect to pay 120k (on discount).

Gudang Garam comes in all types and "grades"
As #1 says, a decent pack of 12 sticks will cost around 15k nowadays..... with garam cheaper options for 16 sticks being around 18k per pack.
The favourite choice is Sampoerna and they range local price of 15k to as much as 23k per pack (in my experience (April 2017 Tuk Tuk Lake Toba).

Of course some of the Indonesian kreteks are seriously strong; unfiltered as much as 38mg nicotine with a very high "tar" figure..... my last batch of Garam filtered "lights" were only 13 mg nicotine..... still way higher than what is legal to sell within Europe.

Like I said, it depends on your location; how much the vendor wants to make from you (in excess of local price) and how knowledgeable you are with language and bartering skills......

Some years ago I bought a full carton of sampoerna for 130k which I thought was okay as they were selling at 13k per 16 stick.
Around the corner I met a local friend who was quite upset at the price.... he took the carton from me and headed back to the shop, returning 5 minutes later with same carton plus 30k rp for me.... 10k of the refund was because local price was only 12k per packet and the other 20k refund was for local price discount on buying a full carton.....so yeah, a saving of only a couple of dollars but on the other hand, that gave me over two packs free of charge..... turned out the shop owner was his close family.

Local price can fluctuate in the space of a day or two.... one day 14k; then 15k then down to 14k again...... my local shop would apologise saying the price he sold at was relevant to how much he bought that batch for.

There are three or more classes - cheap, middle and premium.

Then you have the different types of clove cigarette - mild filtered, strong filtered or unfiltered (there are others of course)

So for example Lucky Strike/Club Mild is the middle class mild filtered brand - this is aimed at youth. The better quality brand here is Sampoerna. So Lucky Strike 16 sticks is 14,000, Sampoerna 16 sticks is 20,000. However for some reason most cigarette smokers are too stupid (go figure) to realise that it's cheaper per stick to buy Sampoerna 12 which only costs 13,000rp.

The old man (the cigarette propagandists told me they don't market to women) cigarette is then either the unfiltered Dji Sam Soe (39mg tar!) at 16,000rp/12 sticks, or for the less well-off Gudang Garam Merah at 12,000rp/12 stick. Gudang Garam Surya (typically just 'Surya') is the filtered old man cigarette and is 20,000rp/16 sticks

The cheapest brands are considerably less than 1,000rp/stick while the most expensive do not reach 1,500rp/stick.

So many varieties now. Life gets so complicated.

Initially in the mid 60's the market seemed to be dominated by Bentoel but then Gudang Garam and Dji Sam Soe quickly drew level and kept going. The basic GG in red packet with the image of the warehouse was my addiction. I have had a 50 year relationship with kreteks but have finally accepted a forced separation.

Anyway it’s not the same anymore. Once partaking was a full on sensory experience; a sound and light show with blasts of aroma. What happened? Did cloves become too expensive, or did they just develop more effective ways to crush the life out of the things? All my clothes used to have tell-tale little holes from flying missiles but all that passed long ago. Pleasure and pain.

Enjoy while you can
omp

udangompong
Yeah i agree regarding those little holes.... my favourite shorts which I bought only 3 years ago have only two "clove holes"...... years ago maybe they would have had many more holes.

For sure there is much less "noise effects" from the cracking of the cloves.

My favourite, before leaving after a 2+ year stay in country, was Lucky Strike Mild (club mild).

That brand (for me) replaced Sampoerna which I found was too sweet...... but only after I was forced to smoke LS Mild for a few days due to no other kretek being available.

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