Pet Rock

No feeding, no walks, no mess. The Pet Rock was the joke gift everybody wanted for Christmas 1975.

Yes, people really did buy Pet Rocks. It was just an ordinary rock, sold as a pet. And in 1975, that was unique enough to create a huge gift-buying craze.

Conceived by Gary Dahl, the Pet Rock arrived in a little cardboard box/pet carrier, resting in wood shavings, with a care and training manual (of course you couldn’t just bring a pet rock home and expect it to know how to behave).

The manual explained how to train your new pet, including teaching it to play dead (not a particularly difficult lesson for a rock). No feeding. No walks. No mess to clean up. The packaging gave you something funny to unwrap, and the booklet kept the joke going afterward.

Dahl introduced Pet Rock at a San Francisco gift show in August 1975. Newsweek covered it, newspapers picked up the story, and by Christmas more than a million had sold, according to The Strong’s toy history. I remember the craze - and we had a pet rock at our house (I don’t remember whose it was, but it was definitely a social phenomenon at the time). Nobody was fooled that it was actually a pet - people just wanted to be in on the joke, and for several months, a lot of people got in on it. As with many “must have” toys, by the following year, the original craze had run its course.

The Pet Rock is still around today, and the current version looks pretty much like what I remember - a cardboard box, some wood shavings, and a little rock just waiting for a good home.