Stupid.com
» see stupid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the last words ~
In April 1999 the front page of Stupid.com offered "Stupid Games, Stupid Gifts, & Stupid Candy" and called itself "a production of Bells and Whistles, Inc." By late 2002 the menu had a button for reindeer poop. The man behind it, according to NBC News in 2007 and a student paper in 2004, was Gary Apple, a sitcom writer who decided the internet needed a shop that admitted what it was selling.
Stupid.com opened about a year before I got my first modem, and it sold physical things to people in America, which is two good reasons I never saw it. Our reader did, and wrote in years later still laughing about it.
~ the record ~
| Born | late 1990s, the footer later said since 1997 |
|---|---|
| Peak | the 2000s, with a Top 10 Stupid Gifts list every December |
| Killed | 2020, after a facelift notice |
| Lifespan | about 23 years |
| Made by | Gary Apple, later Bells and Whistles Inc. and Lotus Internet Group |
| Killed by | a facelift that never finished |
~ the catalog ~
What our reader remembers is the stock: chocolate candy shaped like reindeer droppings, sticky stretchy things you threw at walls, rubber chickens, x-ray glasses and potato guns. What they remember even more is the writing. The site's tagline was "A Complete Waste of Perfectly Good Technology". The candy section was "Candy With No Reason To Exist". Its buyers, the site said, combed the world "looking for silly, weird, and useless things", and the whole pitch came down to stupid gifts for your stupid friends.
Every December it sent out a press release with its Top 10 Stupid Gifts of the year, and it was still doing that in 2015.
~ the owners ~
By January 2008 the footer said "Since 1997" and "a division of the Lotus Internet Group, Inc." next to a PC Magazine Top 100 badge. By 2011 the About page gave an address in Johnson City, Tennessee, with a toll-free number and live chat. The jokes stayed the same through all of it.
Our reader also remembers it linking to geeks.com, where they used to stare at the first light-up keyboards. I could not find that link in the archived pages, but geeks.com had its own ending. The computer parts shop in Oceanside, California turned off ordering on 2 August 2013 after seventeen years.
~ stay tuned ~
In November 2019 the front page changed to "STUPID IS GETTING A FACELIFT! ~ STAY TUNED..." with a pointer to a sister site, glowsource.com. In February 2020 the address started redirecting to a store on a hosted shop platform, and the last archived copy of that store is from 17 April 2020. After that there is nothing until a "coming soon" page in November 2024. Today the domain promotes a Solana memecoin, which the old copywriters would probably have had something to say about.
credit to darkocean, who still remembers the reindeer poop. with our thanks.
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other dot com: Mt. Gox, Cyberian Outpost, Bluefly, Vroom
also died in the 2020s: Fusion TV, Slingbox, Flash games
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