Dads and Grads

Everything has to start somewhere, right?

So we’re not sure if it was in 1920 or 1993 or 2004, but at some point, somebody was the first.

A marketer, almost certainly. They looked at June on the calendar, squinting.

Father’s Day. Graduation.

Celebration of paternal figures. Last day of school.

Patriarchs. Diploma holders.

Dads.

Grads.

Holy shit.

You must have been able to feel the room change. Someone put down a bagel. Someone else uncapped a dry-erase marker. By lunch, a seasonal retail phrase had been born, and ever since, dads and grads have been unceremoniously slapped together into a half-assed little tagline for everything from electronics to gas station gift cards.

Dads and Grads! Come buy lottery tickets.

Dads and Grads! We have discounted taxidermy all month long.

Dads and Grads! Embrace your role as recipients of the least thoughtful marketing you’re going to see all year.

I just searched “Dads & Grads” in my email. Shoutout to Dunkin’, Sephora, Ridge, The New York Times, Panera Bread, Blaze Pizza, Tile, Sene, Venmo, Apple, Google, and cough Woot for taking the collective power of what must be a staggering array of marketing budgets and saying, “fuck it, let’s do the rhyme thing then go have lunch.”

And that list of emails is just since Friday, by the way.

So in the spirit of this time of year, when suburban neighborhoods are dotted with brilliant white graduation tents and we all give the smallest amount of thought possible to Father’s Day, we present: manly face stuff.

It doesn’t arrive by Father’s Day, and let’s just say that’s on purpose. Because dads, to say nothing of grads, deserve gifts that say more than “I acknowledge that you have a face and/or beard.”

No, this is face/beard stuff for the rest of the time. To buy for yourself. To pick up for the hell of it for someone else. To introduce a scrubby little ritual to faces that are probably mostly cared for as an afterthought.

It doesn’t get you off the hook for a gift. And it’s technically from Barstool, but we don’t really need to get into all that here. Just take this lovely day in June as an opportunity to pick up a weirdly robust supply of some very decent face-cleaning product.

Dads and Grads!!