Fred's Book Club: Pet and 'Net.

Welcome, friends, to another episode in the Humpback Writers series, which runs every week on Wednesday, or Hump Day. Are there actually humps, or camels, or anything like that connected to these books? Beats me. Humps be damned! Sometimes these things are only even books by a stretch of the imagination. 

That applies today, as we have a look at the sad remains of what once, briefly, was a titan of the Internet bubble, now almost entirely forgotten. I am referring to the "author" of a novelty book produced during that wild era, a book featuring a character that was for a short time one of the most popular advertising mascots in the world. And this is that book:

Those of us over age 23 or so will probably remember the brief renown of the commercials for Pets.com. This was a pet supply site founded in 1998 for that World Wide Web thingy, which was advertised by a wacky sock puppet in the shape of a dog, voiced by actor Michael Ian Black. This is that dog, and this is the short book that featured some of his signature humor. 

These are three spreads from the book, and there's not a whole lot more; as it promises on the back cover, "as much as I could fit on a roll of 35mm film." That's about all there is to it. It's short and funny, meant to cash in on the popularity of the commercials. Unfortunately that was about the only thing Pets.com did cash in on. 

In these days of streaming TV I wonder if we'll ever have such an advertising phenomenon again. The puppet was interviewed on network television -- it even was a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. So naturally branded sock puppet products like this book would follow.

This was an era when bales of funding went to any old startup online, after which the entrepreneurs would reveal that they didn't know what they were doing, didn't have any idea how to get a customer base that would support the massive spending used to get things going, were only interested in blowing money on pool tables and employee backrubs and high salaries and nothing else, or some other combination of incompetence and malfeasance. As noted in Wikipedia's necropsy of the site, "Although sales rose dramatically due to the attention [of the sock puppet], the company lost money on most of its sales through mismanagement. Its high public profile during its brief existence made it one of the more notable victims of the dot-com bubble in the 2000s." I'd heard that Petco bought much of the remains of the property, but now the URL Pets.com leads you to the PetSmart site.

Running a pet supply site can be tricky. Pet food in any bulk, canned or bagged, is quite heavy and expensive to ship. Pet owners who know that regulation of pet products is nothing compared to that for human products are often wary of buying online, or at least they were in 2000. Amazon started a pet site called Wag (after losing its own stake in Pets.com), but has pretty much folded it into the regular site now. The real breakout in the field was Chewy.com, which we at Key Casa have found to be an amazing and dedicated site for pet owners. Unfortunately it was bought by PetSmart, whose own site was so-so, but so far Chewy has remained very good and we are regular customers.

As for the sock puppet -- well, you may remember that for a while he was doing ads for auto loans, saying "everyone deserves a second chance." But the ads were not funny, just sad; someone else was doing his distinctive voice, and it was not quite right. It all came to an end soon enough. Sic transit gloria puppi, and all that. 

But in this era where sock puppets are so often in the news, sometimes serving as our politicians, let's pause for a moment to remember a really popular sock puppet, who had a day in the sun that was so brilliant, it was doomed to burn out quickly.