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Porkrind.com
The way the online pork rind store came about is best
told as a story: In 1998 I went on a week long
vacation with my oldest and dearest friend, Eric. We
rented a truck and went on what would become the
"Twisted Texas Tour." We hit the Hill Country,
Dallas-FW, Huntsville (he's obsessed with prison),
Houston, San Antonio, and Nuevo Laredo. On the road
to Mexico, we got down to a 1/8 of a tank on the
sparse highway. Eric got nervous, and eats a bit too
much when anxious. When we got to a gas station, he
wolfed down a 2 ounce (4 serving) bag of pork rinds, and a bottle of Big
Red soda.
He said, "damn, I gotta get back on my diet when I get
back to Boston." I said, "Diet? Bullshit! Nobody
can eat pork rinds like that unless they've been
practicing."
When I got back, I wanted to build an online
travelogue and host it on a cool sounding domain name.
Porkrinds.com was taken, so http://www.porkrind.com/
became my piece of the web. I started out the site as
a single page portal to every link about pork rinds on
the web. The background graphic of "the pork rind
resource" is a bed of pork rinds. It is now the only
external link on the wikipedia entry for pork rinds
(even though I made up half of the facts).
A few weeks later, recovering from spinal surgery,
and on short term disability from my tech support job
at Lotus/IBM, while writing the travelogue, I got the
idea of setting up a novelty snack gift site. I
contacted the Department of Agriculture, and they
faxed me a list of Texas pork rind factories. The CEO
of the first factory I called saw the wisdom of
marketing his product on the Internet, and he sold me
3 oz bags for $1.05. I did a google search to see
what other online vendors were charging. There
weren't any! I then decided to charge $4 a bag,
customer paying shipping, of course. I designed
graphics for the site, and corresponded electronically
with Kinkos to make stickers to put on the bags, and
business cards that said, "happy anniversary," "happy
birthday" and other occasions appropriate times to
give the gift of rinds. I even had 5 dozen t-shirts
with the evil green pig with red eyes logo, and
corporate slogan, "Porkrind.com send 'em some damn
pork rinds" I bought 200 magnetic porkrind.com chip clips, and created a CCNow account
to handle online crredit card transactions. I
sent a computer to the factory and set them up with a
UPS account, and I was in business.
I planned for the site to be a novelty gift store, as
you can hear in the radio commercial, but I started
getting e-mails asking me how many grams of
carbohydrates there were in each serving. Most of my first customers
weren't buying rinds as gifts, they were buying them for themselves. I quickly
realized I was in a unique position to take advantage
of the new diet fad, Atkins. Hunter S. Thompson wrote
in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "When the going
gets weird, the weird turn pro." I updated my site's
cascading style sheet so my background color changed
from black to white, exchanged the evil pig logo to a
professionally created:
Things went well. I quickly became CEO of Austin's
only profitable .com corporation. Yes, I incorporated
as "Internet Specialty Foods, Inc." and got a state
issued embossing stamp. I'd trade shares in my
Corporation for discounts on goods and services all
over town. I sent rinds to 42 states and 7 foreign
countries, including Pakistan.
Things slowed down as others entered the market with
much lower prices and greater varieties of flavors. I
closed shop in early 2001, in the black.
Now the site is the home of the ultimate food fetish,
pork rind porn. I have dozens of images of 19 year
olds with superimposed bags of pork rinds, and jokes.
Example: 2 girls kissing, and a caption reading "Wow,
you taste great! Have you been eating Porkrind.com
brand pork rinds?" I also have a couple .zip files
full of pics of models posing with pork rinds.
The site also hosts a collection of origanal media:
What I work on now mostly is my blog, which my psychoanalyst
always reads the day before I visit him.
Join the Society for Preserving Porkrind.com
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Try using this image as a background image on your screen. When tiled,
your screen becomes a sea of pork rinds!
