Pet Rock

1975

Date: August 1975 to February 1976 · Place: Los Gatos, California (originator) · United States (market) · Figures: Gary Dahl, advertising copywriter and inventor · Rod Lawrence, illustrator of the manual · Tags: Object, Fad, Joke 01. A Joke Sold at Cost-Plus Gary Dahl, a Los Gatos copywriter, is drinking with friends in April 1975 when they complain about pets. He says his pet is a rock. He goes home and writes a 32-page training manual: how to housebreak it (place on newspaper), how to teach it to sit, stay, attack. The rock costs him about a penny from a builder's supply in Rosarito Beach. The straw-filled box and manual cost a dollar. He retails it for $3.95. He sells about 1.5 million units between August and Christmas 1975, mostly through Neiman Marcus and department-store novelty counters. 02. The Object That Replicates by Embarrassment The Pet Rock works as a meme because the gift carries the joke for the giver. The recipient laughs, shows colleagues, who buy one for their cousin. The product is the punchline; the box is the delivery system. By December 1975 Newsweek, Time, and the Tonight Show have all done segments. Dahl is on Carson twice. Five months in, every five-and-dime is stocked with knockoffs: pet rocks with googly eyes, Pet Rock cemeteries, divorce papers for your rock. The category collapses inside its own saturation by Valentine's Day 1976. Dahl walks away with a reported $15 million in revenue and roughly $2 million in profit. "Sometimes I look at people and wonder how I ever sold them a rock." — Gary Dahl, quoted in People magazine, November 1975 03. Template for the Ironic Object Every later joke product (Yule Log VHS, Snuggie, Big Mouth Billy Bass, The Onion's I Am the Walrus T-shirts) descends from a Los Gatos garage in 1975. The Pet Rock proves a market exists for objects whose only function is to be a meme other people can witness you owning. Dahl dies in 2015 in Jacksonville, Oregon. The original packaging design with Rod Lawrence's deadpan dog-manual illustrations is in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Sources • Gary Dahl, The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock (Rock Bottom Productions, 1975) • Margalit Fox, 'Gary Dahl, Inventor of the Pet Rock, Dies at 78,' The New York Times, April 1, 2015 • Bruce Watson, 'The Pet Rock Story,' Smithsonian Magazine, March 2015 • 'And You Thought It Was Just a Rock,' People, November 24, 1975