Black Friday Bullshit
This year for Black Friday, Cards Against Humanity sold 30,000 boxes of actual bullshit from a literal bull.
This is the latest in a tradition Black Friday pranks that we’ve pulled. Two years ago we released a pay-what-you-want pack and donated the proceeds to the Wikimedia foundation. Last year we ran a special “$5 more sale” and raised the prices on all of our products by $5.
We hate Black Friday. Who doesn’t? It’s a vulgar monument to consumerism, right after Thanksgiving, an American holiday about gratitude and thankfulness that that you’re supposed to spend with your family.
Nothing is funnier to us than the culture jamming that happens on Black Friday – people who run up to a Best Buy moments before it opens to a huge line and u-lock the doors shut, and these pranks are our little contribution.
The Idea
We started brainstorming Black Friday prank ideas during our summer retreat on lake Michigan. We talked about an abandoned idea from last year, a $0.01-off coupon, but dismissed it because even though it was funny, it was still technically a Black Friday sale.
Ben came up with the idea to just sell bullshit, and we had a pretty good laugh over it. We’ve learned to trust our gut in these situations – if something makes us laugh, it will usually connect with other people in the same way.
Finding the Poop
We did some preliminary research and found that cow poop can be sold and mailed as an industrial product, so our next call was to our printer Shari from AdMagic. I remember that call pretty well. It began, “Shari, are you sitting down?”
In the past, we’ve asked Shari to procure some incredibly weird stuff – highlights include three tons of oats and a hundreds thousand lumps of coal. But she embraced the poop challenge like the consummate professional that she is, and a few weeks later we were talking to a very confused cattle rancher in Texas named Amy.
We asked Amy what it was like when we first described our order to her, and she said, “It was a little overwhelming, I was surprised that somebody wanted thirty two thousand pieces of crap. But you know, it is what it is.” As we began the months-long poop gather process and Rancher Amy learned more about the prank, she said, “I was surprised to see how it was used, it was very funny.”
The poop was collected from bulls, pasteurized, and sorted into boxes by one of our mailing houses (sorry mailing house).
Packaging
It was important that the packaging be extremely high quality, minimalist, and classy. The more professional the packaging was, the more it heightened the joke.
We went through several prototypes, starting with a perfect cube (above), but ended up with a squat, matte-black box that just says “Bullshit by Cards Against Humanity.” This shape was great because when we lined the top and bottom with black foam, it safely enclosed the poop so that it stayed in one solid piece during mailing (we tested this by mailing poop back and forth from Chicago to LA a few times). It’s also a great visual pun on a jewelry box – it feels like something special and valuable might be inside.
The boxes were produced by the same premium box factory that makes Apple’s packaging – they provide amazing matte finishes and craftsmanship.
Cards Against Humanity designer Emily Haasch drew the adorable poop icon, and we added him to the mailing box.
The Buttons
As Emily and I were designing the packaging, we got an email from our neighbors and frequent collaborator, the Busy Beaver Button Company.
Subject: Test our New Product?
Busy Beaver is currently R&D-ing Scratch N’ Sniff buttons and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind helping out. If you’re interested, I’ll provide you a link next week where you’ll be able to order 50 1-inch Scratch N’ Sniff buttons in whatever design you’d like. We’ll give you the buttons for free in exchange for feedback on the ordering process and quality of the buttons. Would you be interested?
I immediately clicked over to their site to see the smell options, and there it was: Coffee, Cotton Candy, Lavender, Lemon, Peppermint or Poop. This immediately got me excited because it solved one of my biggest disappointments with the poop, which was that the pasteurization process killed any bacteria, and any lingering “poop” smell.
We got a sample of the poop buttons and they smelled absolutely disgusting, we knew we had to include them. We had Busy Beaver hide the Scratch N’ Sniff sticker on the inside of the button, and very few people noticed that it was the source of the smell in the box.
Quantities and Pricing
There’s no good way to know how much poop you can sell on Black Friday, so we just guessed 30,000. It was fewer people than signed up for our 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit promotion last year, but enough boxes that we thought people would have a chance to get in on the joke.
Our resident statistician/physicist Josh said:
After a lot of haggling and recrimination (“But what if we sell out of the bullshit?” “What do we do with all the bullshit if we don’t sell out?” “Why are we arguing about this…just pick something!”), we picked a nice round number that we thought could plausibly sell out if about 25% of the people who clicked on the email link bought the bullshit.
The pricing for production broke down as follows:
- Custom box: $1.55
- Poop: $0.27
- Pin: $0.31
- Shipping box: $0.16
- Freight of above to mail house: $0.20
- Handling: $0.68
- Postage: $2.32
- Credit card fee at $6: $0.31
This left us with a cost of $5.80, so we charged $6 for the final product.
Profits
We sold out of Bullshit boxes in a few hours, leaving us with a profit of $6,000. We worked with our friend Pat Rothfuss’ Worldbuilders event to donate that money to Heifer International, a non-profit that aims to eradicate poverty and hunger by providing livestock to developing communities. Our $6,000 will enable Heifer to buy twelve cows for families in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, spreading the gift of bullshit worldwide.
Much like last year, stories about the poop helped sales of Cards Against Humanity and our other products in the following days – we’re continuing to have great holiday sales.
Confusion
After the bullshit shipped, some people were confused, even though we took great pains to be clear about what we were selling. The FAQ on the site read:
Are you selling any of your normal products today? No.
Is this actually poop? Yes.
Is it also something that’s not poop? No.
Can I return it when I realize that it’s actually just poop? No.
Is the poop dangerous? No. The poop is sterilized.
Is it legal to mail poop? Only one way to be sure.
Why is the poop only $6? Through the magic of incredible Black Friday super-savings.
We got maybe a dozen angry emails from people, some of which we read dramatically.
What Does It Mean
Much has been written about our Bullshit prank, in TIME, Market Watch, AdWeek, WGN, Mic, Grist, INC, Business Insider, Ars Technica, CNBC, and dozens of other places.
Many people interpret the poop as cynical – proof that people will buy anything. Some people were angry about it:
They said they donated the money to Heifer International, which distributes livestock to families in communities around the world to promote self-sustainability. So a good thing came out of a shitty thing (I EAGERLY AWAIT YOUR ‘I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE’ MEMES). But 30,000 people shelled out $6 a pop to buy fucking SHIT. $174,000 went to sending people desperate to get their hands on some kind of pop culture commodity aka boxes of actual shit and $6,000 went to an organization trying to make a difference in the lives of the world’s impoverished communities.
Other people reported on the prank as though we had duped people trying to buy our game – they reposted the confused emails we received. Some other people speculated that people bought the bullshit to try and resell it (it’s selling for nearly $50 a box on eBay).
But that’s not why I think people bought the poop. We didn’t know much going into this prank, but the one thing we did know is that there’s no protesting capitalism. There’s nothing you can say about capitalism that it won’t subsume and sell back to you. So the really funny, radical thing for us isn’t just to complain about Black Friday on Twitter, but to participate in a way that takes it to a point of absurdity.
I see these pranks as a kind of improv where the public is our scene partner. We do our part, and they do theirs. Together, we create a spectacle that is simultaneously funny and real. That kind of humor can be incredibly powerful. George Carlin said:
When you make someone laugh at a new idea, you’re guiding their whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.
$6 might be a lot for a gag, but it’s a pretty good price to get an article about poop in Business Insider.
This whole gag is a thing of beauty.