Collecting Pet Rocks
There is a saying that if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door. But what if you’re indifferent to mice and mousetraps, and instead have smooth rocks on your mind? Well, if you’re an enterprising hustler like advertising executive Gary Dahl, you create a smooth rock fad out of nothing. Then you become a millionaire, selling millions of rocks that you picked up from a Mexican beach for next to nothing.
It began when Dahl was knocking back a few drinks at a bar, while listening to some of his friends moan and complain about the time and effort spent caring for their pets. So he joked about having an idea for a perfect pet: a rock. Rocks don’t need feeding, walking, grooming, or bathing. They don’t act up or make a mess. They don’t get sick and need expensive trips to the vet, and they don’t die.
It was a half drunk joke at a bar, and for most people, that’s where it would have ended, forgotten by the time they settled their tab and staggered back home. But Gary Dahl was not most people, and the gears kept turning in his head about pet rocks. Why not? The more he mulled it, the more feasible it seemed. Especially in the context of the moment, 1975 America, and where he lived, the San Francisco Bay Area, where stuff that seems whacky to rest of the world is often viewed as mainstream.
The idea seemed stupid, but Dahl believed in its feasibility, and proceeded to collect smooth rocks from Rosarito Beach in Mexico, which cost him about a penny each. Then he wrote a humorous and gag filled 32 page owner’s manual, titled “The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock“, with instructions on how to raise and care for one’s Pet Rock. That was accompanied by birth certificates and documentation attesting to the rock’s lineage and purity of breed. Dahl then stuffed everything in a straw lined box that represented his biggest expense, and sold his Pet Rocks for $3.95 each. They sold like hotcakes. As he put it later during an interview: “I was the only one sold on my idea. My wife thought I was crazy. A lot of my friends thought I was crazy. And… it worked. But I was the only one who thought it would“.
The craze lasted for only a few months, but while the fad lasted, Gary Dahl sold about one and a half million Pet Rocks in two and a half months. Before they went out of style, 5 million Pet Rocks had been sold, and Dahl had become a millionaire. He ploughed his proceeds into opening a bar in Los Gatos, CA. He also tried his hand at other gag products, such as “Red China Dirt” – an attempt to smuggle mainland China into the US, one cubic inch at a time. However, with the Pet Rock, Dahl had managed to capture lightning in a bottle – a feat few people ever get to pull even once. He would not pull it off twice, and none of his other novelty items met with anything like the success of the Pet Rocks.