Pet Rock By Gary Dahl Sparknotes

Gary Dahl is an advertising agency owner, entrepreneur and the creator of the Pet Rock. Dahl was sitting in a bar listening to friends complain about their pets. He got the idea of creating “the perfect pet”. A rock would not need to be fed, bathed, walked, groomed and would not die, become sick, or be fractious. This led to the idea of selling rocks to people as pets, complete with instructions. The instruction book was the real product, which was full of gags and puns. The 1975 passion only lasted about half a year, but that was enough to make Dahl a millionaire. He made up to $15m in just the first six months. From the proceeds of his perfect "pets," Dahl opened a bar in Los Gatos, California. He later attempted to follow up this success selling "Sand Breeding Kits" and "Red China Dirt," a plan to exoprt Chinese continent to the United States, 1cm3 at a time. These innovations didn’t attracted as much interest as the Pet Rock. The first Pet Rocks were ordinary gray stones bought at a builder's supply store. They
The instruction book was the real product: it was full of gags, tricks and jokes. It had several commands that could be taught to the new pet. "Sit" and "stay" were effortless to achieve, "roll over" usually required a little extra help from the trainer. "Come", "stand" and "shake hands" were found to be impossible to teach, but "attack" was really simple (with some help from the owner). The owners found that training their pet rocks was very simple. Dahl's biggest investment was the cutting and manufacturing the boxes. The rocks only cost a penny each, and the straw was also cheap. For the initial run of booklets, Dahl had a printing job for a client and printing the pet rock booklet became his main job. This made the process faster requiring only a cut and trim, at almost no cost except some