The Pet Rock rerun

We're in low power mode; here's one that people liked earlier this year.

Hi folks! We’re going to be in Low Power Mode today as I begin our Odyssean (but worth it) Christmas vacation travel schedule. As part of this, I’m going to re-share one of the best-received newsletters of the year. Apologies to those of you who have already seen it, but (a) it was on The Other Newsletter, and (b) I’m only human.

I guess that since Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel are all in reruns this week with their writing staffs of dozens, I can do that once in a while as well.

(We do have an all-new “7 other things” section below; usually we skip that in Low Power Mode but there’s a lot going on!)

We’ll be off for Christmas Day and the day after; see you on Friday! Merry Christmas!

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"The rock ... will remain on the paper until you remove it"

Photo by Carl Tronders on Unsplash

Fifty years ago this coming April, a man named Gary Dahl was hanging out in a Northern California bar. The drinkers’ talk turned to pets, and a well-lubricated Dahl made up a joke on the spot.

He had the easiest, best pet of all time, he declared: a pet rock.

Over the next two weeks, Dahl, who was a "freelance copywriter" at the time -- which sounded better than telling people he was unemployed, he later explained (although it was equally non-renumerative) -- spent two weeks writing a how-to manual describing the care and feeding of his devoted companion.

Six months later, he was a millionaire. As the New York Times later explained:

The genius was in the packaging. Each Pet Rock came in a cardboard carrying case, complete with air holes, tenderly nestled on a bed of excelsior …

“If, when you remove the rock from its box it appears to be excited, place it on some old newspapers,” the [accompanying] manual read. “The rock will know what the paper is for and will require no further instruction. It will remain on the paper until you remove it.”

Pet Rocks hit the marketplace in time for Christmas 1975. … In a matter of months, some 1.5 million rocks were sold.

The Pet Rock retailed for $3.95, which would be about $22.95 today. If you weren't around then, or if you'd just like to see what this was like, check out this "from the archives" clip from NBC News back then.

My favorite part of the clip is the realization that this crazy, drunken idea led to the creation of quite a few factory and assembly jobs, even besides Dahl's riches.

For a while, Dahl was held up in America as the greatest entrepreneur of all time!

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were tinkering in a garage, Bill Gates was setting up shop in New Mexico. (Elon Musk was 3 years old.)

Dahl was the one being featured on The Tonight Show and in Time magazine.

But he correctly projected the trend might last another year or so before it tapered off.

"Then I'll be out of the rock business and into some other insane scheme," he told a reporter around Christmas that year. "Or lying on a beach someplace, not caring about it."

He was right; by the end of the Christmas shopping season, it was all over.

Dahl tried a few other similar products. He tried to sell an “Original Sand Breeding Kit,” for example, which promised to let you “grow your own desert wasteland.”

But his later successes never came close to the Pet Rock.

As the Times summarized:

Though the rock made him wealthy, it also made him wary, for he was besieged ever after by hordes of would-be inventors, seeking his advice on the next big thing.

“There’s a bizarre lunatic fringe who feel I owe them a living,” Mr. Dahl told The Associated Press in 1988. “Sometimes I look back and wonder if my life wouldn’t have been simpler if I hadn’t done it.”

Still, find me another product that achieves nearly a 1 percent market penetration of the entire United States, at a not-insignificant price point, in less than a year.

It was like a mineral that went viral, long before social media.

Think about this the next time you’re hanging out with friends and enjoying a nice cold beverage.

I don't know if I came up with any brilliant million-dollar ideas in the process. But it's nice to know that it could happen!

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7 other things (new)

• President Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row — a list that includes at least five child killers and several mass murderers — while leaving out three notorious fiends. The three men on federal death row who did not get a commutation were Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother killed three people in 2013; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, and Dylann Roof, who killed nine black Charleston churchgoers in 2015. (NY Post)

• President-elect Donald Trump is openly discussing provocative aspirations for U.S. territorial expansion as he prepares to return to the White House, warning about taking over the Panama Canal and wresting control of Greenland from Denmark. His comments, delivered in public remarks and social-media posts on Sunday, come after he recently trolled Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by suggesting that Canada should become the 51st state and referring to Trudeau as a governor. (WSJ)

• The House Ethics Committee on Monday released a report that found evidence that former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was President-elect Trump's first pick to be the U.S. attorney general, paid thousands of dollars for sex and drugs, including allegedly paying a 17-year-old girl for sex in 2017. You can find the full report here, if you don't have enough tawdry reading materials. (CNN)

• Congress' long-simmering debate over the age of its members has resurfaced over revelations that Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) has been living in an independent living facility in Texas. A source familiar with the matter told Axios that Granger moved into the facility around July. (Axios)

• As Waymo self-driving taxis expands its service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, some passengers have found that traveling by robotaxi can make riders into sitting ducks for a new form of public harassment: people who followed, obstructed or attempted to enter a driverless vehicle they were riding in. (The Washington Post)

• This is the most wonderful time of year for some; loneliest for others. (USA Today)

• The fun — and confusion — of celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah on the same date. (NPR)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Sinitta Leunen on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!