How a Scratchy Fountain Pen Taught Me the Real Cost of “Cheap”

The first time I walked into a Lakeshore Learning teacher store, I wasn't sure I belonged. I'm not a teacher. I'm the person who orders the paper clips—officially, the office administrator at a small private school. Forty employees, 380 students, and a purchasing budget that one VP described as “don't screw it up.”

That was January 2022. We were adding two kindergarten classrooms, which meant furniture, teaching materials, and a long list of things I'd never bought before. I had a catalog, a credit card, and a dangerous amount of confidence.

The projector that cost me twice

The first big purchase was a projector. A veteran kindergarten teacher—twenty-three years in the classroom—asked for the Lakeshore Learning trace and draw projector. You know the one: kids place a picture under the light and trace it onto paper. She'd used one at her previous school and wanted it in her new classroom.

I looked it up. It was roughly double the price of a generic “light-up tracing board” I found online.

“Same thing,” I told myself. “Light. Surface. Tracing. The box is just shinier.”

I ordered the generic one. It arrived in three days and worked beautifully. For about six weeks.

Then the light flickered, dimmed, and died. No warranty paperwork. No phone number. The listing had vanished from the marketplace entirely. It was like buying a product from a ghost.

I ordered the Lakeshore projector anyway and walked into the Lakeshore Learning teacher store to pick it up. No foggy listing, no mystery seller. Just a box on a shelf, a receipt I could file, and a customer service desk I could walk back to if something went wrong.

In my first year, I made the classic rookie mistake: confusing purchase price with cost. The “cheap” projector turned into a $125 problem once I counted the replacement. The “expensive” one would have been the cheaper choice from day one.

The desk that wobbled into my spreadsheet

Projector lesson absorbed. Or so I thought. A few weeks later, I did it again, this time with office desks.

Our two new admin assistants needed workstations. My regular vendor quoted $260 per desk. A wholesale office supply company—the kind that advertises “up to 70% off retail!”—had a comparable office desk for $185, free shipping.

I asked the obvious question: “Are these the same desk?”

They said yes.

They weren't.

The $185 desks had particleboard tops that bubbled after two weeks. The legs wobbled at different rhythms. And one arrived with a cracked drawer that I spent three weeks chasing a replacement for. “We're waiting on a shipment” became my least favorite sentence in the English language.

I said, “Can you expedite the part?” They heard, “Sure, sometime next month is fine.”

Net result: one new hire working from a folding table, one purchasing agent looking incompetent, and two desks I eventually replaced with the $260 version anyway. I stopped tracking the “savings” at that point.

From the outside, it looks like finding the low-price vendor is the win. The reality is that the invoice is just the opening bid. Every email, every delay, every cracked drawer is part of the final price.

Bentgo lunch boxes: the one time the teachers were right

I tell this story now with the hindsight of someone who has learned to listen to teachers. They know what survives a classroom. I don't.

Our after-care program needed lunch containers for field trip days. The teachers asked for Bentgo lunch boxes—the compartmentalized containers with the secure lids, about $20 each. At the big-box store, I could get basic plastic lunch containers for $6.

“Do we really need the fancy ones?” I asked.

The after-care coordinator—a patient woman—said, “The cheap ones leak. And they crack. We've been through three sets.”

I ordered twelve Bentgo boxes, overruled by a woman who'd been cleaning up lunch spills since before my first job. Eighteen months later, every single Bentgo box is still in service. Weekly use. Dishwasher cycles. Dropped on school pavement. The lids still seal. The compartments still separate. They look, frankly, like they were purchased last month.

People assume the cheap container is the budget-friendly choice. The reality is the opposite: cheap containers cost more, you just pay the difference in replacement cycles and leaked dressing on someone's backpack. The $14-per-unit difference felt like a splurge at the time; it turned out to be a discount.

The scratchy fountain pen

And then there was the pen. This is where something clicked.

One of our literacy specialists—a woman who has taught handwriting for decades—handed me a fountain pen. Her grandfather's. “The nib is scratchy,” she said. “Can you find a replacement?”

Now, to be clear: I knew nothing about fountain pens. I still don't. My first instinct was to search for a new pen and process the paperwork.

But she didn't ask for a new pen. She asked how to fix the one she had.

I looked it up. Turns out, how to fix a scratchy fountain pen nib is much simpler than most people think. People assume a scratchy nib means the pen is worn out or damaged. In most cases, it's neither—the tines are just a fraction of a millimeter out of alignment. When the two tines don't sit evenly, the tip catches on the paper, and that's the scratchy feeling. The fix starts with inspecting the nib under magnification (a loupe works; so does a zoomed-in phone camera), then gently pressing the high tine down with a thumbnail to bring it level with the other. If the tip still feels rough, a few passes on a fine micromesh pad—12,000 grit, if you want to go that deep—can polish out the rough spot.

We didn't attempt that ourselves, mostly because it's a vintage pen with sentimental value. She found a repair artisan who aligned and polished the nib for $25. The pen writes beautifully now. A replacement of equivalent quality, if one could even be found, would have run $175—and it wouldn't have been her grandfather's pen.

The total cost of fixing: twenty-five dollars and a two-week wait. The total cost of replacing: a hundred seventy-five dollars, plus the loss of an object that mattered. It took a 25-year veteran teacher and a grandpa's pen to make the difference click for me.

What it all adds up to

If you've managed procurement for any length of time, you have a name for this: total cost of ownership. TCO. It's an ugly acronym for a simple idea—the purchase price is not the price.

The generic projector became a $125 mistake once I added the replacement. The “affordable” desks cost me hours of admin time, a dented reputation with a new hire, and eventually the $260 desks anyway. The $6 lunch containers would have cost us the same as the Bentgo boxes—but with a lot more spilled dressing in between. And the pen reminded me that some things aren't even about the money.

I'm not going to pretend I've mastered it. Earlier this year, I ordered a batch of dry-erase markers from an unfamiliar supplier because the price was 20% lower. The caps don't stay on. A box of 60 markers is now a box of 60 disappointing, desiccated chalk-like objects that smear. I didn't use my own framework. It happens.

But the framework has changed most of my decisions. I ask whether replacement parts exist. I ask how long the warranty actually lasts. I ask what happens to the teacher who's waving a dead projector at me—how many hours does she lose, how many kids lose the lesson, how much does that ripple through the day?

I've also come to appreciate the quieter costs. Every season, the Lakeshore Learning catalog lands in my mailbox. With the USPS First-Class Mail rate at $0.73 per standard letter as of January 2025 (usps.com/stamps), they're paying real money to reach me. They don't do that because it's the cheapest option. They do it because they know teachers—and the people who buy for them—still flip through pages.

The lesson, to me, is that cheaper is a feeling, but cost is a number. The invoice is just page one. The full story includes a wobbly desk, a cracked drawer, and a lunch container that survives a third-grader. Factor all of that in, and the “expensive” option starts looking like the real bargain.

Bottom line

Would I do it differently if I could go back to January 2022? Yes. But I wouldn't just buy the higher-priced items. I'd go back with a better question.

Instead of “What's the cheapest option?” I'd ask: “What's the total cost of this thing over its life, including my time, the teacher's time, and the probability that it fails at the worst possible moment?”

I think about that teacher and her grandfather's pen a lot. A $25 repair doesn't look like a smart purchasing decision on paper. It doesn't show up in a quarterly savings report. But it saved money, saved a meaningful object, and saved one of the best teachers in our building the heartache of losing something she loved. Not every cost fits on an invoice. But every cost is still a cost.

The pen writes beautifully, by the way. And the Lakeshore projector is still going strong, three years in. That's a return on investment I can feel.