Anecdotally, I've had 2 experiences with people like that. One was a coder who was self employed and worked out of his house, and another was my auto mechanic before I moved. Both always had a cig burning sitting burning in an ashtray but only picked up and consumed maybe 25% of it while they were working.
In some places, cigs might cost $15/pack (your numbers), but I just passed by a Chevron gas station selling for $7 where I live (Portland, OR). The cost depends greatly on the local/state taxes and is not indicative of everywhere. A carton of Marlboros here (the most expensive brand) is around $60 ($6/pack). A quick scan of this table [1] shows rates by state. A cursory look shows a tax range of about 0.37% (Georgia) to 4.5% (DC), but those are only the state taxes and don't take into account other local taxes. I'm just pointing out your example of $30/day (I assume where you live) is quite different from $12/day where I live, and there are even cheaper places than where I live. Portland isn't exactly the boonies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_...
That describes pretty well how I smoke the ecig: all day long, maybe three puffs every few minutes. While the normal cigs (maybe four a day) I inhale greedily at high speed.
This wasn't me at all when I smoked two packs a day. I smoked the entire cigarette, and if I was going to put it down for a while, I put it out. And that was when they were cheap.
You just smoke all the time. The first thing I did when I woke up was light a cigarette, before I got out of bed. You choke a couple of cigarettes down during your break, not just one. You smoke through lunch. I was probably 5-7 cigarettes in before I even got to work.
I started Juul in late 2017, was off smoking completely by April 2018 (3 pods a day) and quit Juul cold turkey January 1st, 2019. I’d tried to quit millions of times over 10 years, but Juul made it easy.
This rings absurdly true with me. I realized at some point that a cigarette was a little celebration ritual that I went through after completing anything.
It's also why I'm negative on vaping as a tool for quitting; it doesn't get rid of that ritual part. Snus (someone else also mentioned dipping elsewhere in the thread) does. Entirely quitting the impulse to the ritual took me a good two years, and having the nicotine hit from the snus helped me through it. Quitting the snus was a fairly miserable two weeks.
I'm not denouncing vapes, though, because although I don't think they're good for quitting nicotine addiction, they're good for quitting cigarettes, and that's good enough to lengthen your lifespan by 2-3 years, and the lifespan of your lungs by 10-20 probably. I don't know that we know what the long term effects of inhaling propylene glycol are, but there's no doubt there's a better outlook than cig smoke. I just can't help but recall how gross and unpleasant inhaling what smoke machines produced was when I was in a touring band.
edit: entirely incidentally, I feel that ritual made me more productive. Between cigarettes, I felt like I was supposed to do something before the next cigarette. It was like: finish writing that function, smoke, get to the point where I can run tests, smoke while the tests were running, get to the point where I can run benchmarks, smoke while benchmarks are running, get to the point where I can hand things off - make the call to the person I have to hand it to, smoke.
After quitting, life seems more dreamy, spacey, and unstructured. I think that's a point for vaping, although I think the fact that cigs are discrete units that lower in quality slightly after having been put out is both a factor affecting the ritual, and a quality that vaping does not have.
Quit smoking at least 7 years ago, so this isn't just addict wistfulness.