Maker	Pen+Gear
Model	Black
Hardness	HB#2
Features	Cheap!
Price I paid	4¢

When I was going through my public schooling career, I don't really have strong memories of the kinds of pencils that I used. When I was just starting out in kindergarten, we used the standard tree-trunk-with-some-graphite-stuck-in-it training pencils, and after that my pencil memory gets hazy. I want to say that I used a lot of yellow pencils, I think that's true. I also know that I used just any pencils I could get my hands on. Probably the cheapest ones we could find at the store.

Those cheap pencils had all kinds of issues. The lead might break and then just fall out of the pencil. Or I'd sharpen it and then couldn't write anything because the lead was so off-center that after a trip through the sharpener, I was left with a pointed bit of wood instead of something I could make marks with. Or I'd be writing away at whatever and I'd suddenly hit a bit of graphite that had some grit in it. It suddenly felt like I was writing on the mortar in a brick wall for a few minutes. Or the eraser would be so hard that it couldn't be used for anything other than smudging your mistakes.

I've been leery of cheap pencils since then, but that was a long time ago. But one of the reasons I started investigating pencils again is because I suspected that even the cheap pencils are better than the junk I had when I was a kid. But I didn't expect to find pencils that were this cheap.

If you've never been to WalMart, then I envy you¹. One of my local WalMart stores decided to put a bunch of school supplies on clearance a full two months into a nine-month school year for some reason. I paid a pittance for an armload of pencils and way more notebooks that I really needed².

If you've never heard of Pen+Gear, than you've never been in a WalMart. Or, if you have been in a WalMart, you haven't ventured into the stationery section, because this is their house brand of office supplies. They try to make it look like a totally different company, though. They have a website with some basic info and links that don't actually work or go anywhere. The trademark for the name 'Pen+Gear' is owned by WalMart. And I've never seen this brand anywhere else, so I don't know why they're going to these lengths. I don't think they're fooling anybody.

This is the kind of pencil that I would consider a utility pencil. I only paid 4¢, but that was a quirk of them apparently discontinuing or otherwise clearancing them out for one reason or another. If I would have paid the original pre-clearance asking price of 12¢, I would have thought the same thing. What's a utility pencil? It's a thing I just made up, but I'm thinking that it's a pencil that I'm going to use in an environment where I don't care about the pencil that much. I'll use it in a place where I usually just jot down notes and if the pencil breaks or falls apart or walks off, I'm not going to be too upset about it. So, I took them to the office to use instead of the very expensive pens that keep disappearing from my desk.

For whatever reason the workshop at my job has an Apsco Giant pencil sharpener installed that I've known about since I started working there, but I never had much of an excuse to use it. Until now³. I took one of the pencils, gave it a sharpen, and got to work taking very important notes in the generic Staples scratch pad that is omnipresent on my desk.

I used this pencil as my primary writing device for an entire workweek. I took it to meetings, I jotted things down on Post-It® notesand didn't manage to wear my through the lead of that initial sharpen. I don't think that says much about the quality of the lead so much as it shows how much of my work is done via keyboard and mouse instead of by writing things down.

What stood out to me the most is how much this pencil didn't stand out at all. The marks it made were fine. The erasing was good enough. If I looked closely at the sharpened end, I could see where the two pieces of wood that this pencil is made out of were glued together. And I did run into a couple of spots in the graphite where it felt extra scratchy, but those are minor quibbles. The pencil works.

And I guess that's one of the best things about cheap pencils. The bottom of the market has gotten so much better in the last 30-odd years, that even the cheapos are mostly decent. This is a pencil that I would absolutely use to fill up an oversized coffee mug on my desk⁴ and wouldn't be annoyed if someone took one. I'd probably encourage them to do it.

I don't think I'd go so far as to give them out for Halloween trick-or-treaters, though. I don't want to wash eggs off my house.

This article was posted on 21 Oct 2026 and I haven't looked at it since.