Bic Cristal pens (the ubiquitous ballpoint/biro) come in black, blue, red and green. But according to their website:
What? Why? What are crazy people and teenage girls supposed to write letters with in the US? Is there no demand? Does green ink contain some substance banned in the Land of the Free? What’s up with that?
I think this is a question that will be difficult to get a proper answer to, and I believe the reason is just that US Bic Cristal buyers are so uninterested in green ink that Bic has decided to just not sell that there. They will happily sell you a bunch of other green ink pens though.
I remember those… this oppressed European found them too thin, but whether that’s merely my personal preference or shared by enough Europeans to drive a marketing decision, I cannot tell you.
I believe it’s blue ink that doesn’t reproduce well. Thirty years ago, I was on the college newspaper and we used to mark up the pages with blue ink for that reason.
BIC Round Stic Grip Xtra Comfort Ball Pen is available in green, and also purple. So it’s not that Bic pens with green ink are not available in the US, it’s that they don’t sell that particular model with green ink.
I use purple G2s for my writing, for a variety of reasons including just personal preference, and that’s after switching from years of using green. I gave up on the latter because the ink always sucked and the pens skipped and ran dry much more easily than other colors.
I had no idea they’d become a rarity here. Purple G2’s are hard enough to find that I buy them in modest bulk, a couple of dozen at a time, once a year or so. I still have to extract and ‘restart’ cartridges on those, but not as often as green. Funny how the color can make such a difference.