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Tag Archives: sign
Fake Home Depot Shed Signs
Master Prankster Rob Cockerham and his friends around the country recently added some extra signage to the sheds on display in their local Home Depot parking lots.
Rob explains:
Home Depot, forced to lure customers inside without glitzy display windows, seed the warehouse perimeter with their products. This is only practical with hard-to-shoplift items, such as bags of steer manure and storage sheds.
Unfortunately, these sun-baked displays are all but abandoned by the sales staff, and must rely on graphics and signage to speak to their potential customers.
Despite an ambitious number of signs, I felt my local home depot wasn’t addressing some of the strongest benefits of owning a garden/storage/privacy shed/mini-garage/closet. I decided to make some new signs and try them out!
With nine eager volunteers poised to help, I sent signs to try out across the country.
Read all about it: The Shed Prank
Welcoming Home Strangers at JFK Airport
For their latest mission, 20 Improv Everywhere agents personally welcomed home total strangers at JFK airport. Grabbing first and last names from car driver signs, they greeted strangers with personalized posters, flowers, balloons, and a 10-foot wide banner reading, “Welcome Back.”
Turning Campaign Signs Into Birdhouses
Montreal group Les Fourmis came up with a clever use for campaign signs after the recent Canadian election– turn them into birdhouses and put them up around the city. I wonder how many millions of campaign signs there are in the US right now heading to a landfill?
Bring Back Crystal Pepsi
Some clever pranksters managed to get this sign onto MSNBC’s coverage of the DNC on Monday night. I saw it live and found it quite hilarious. I found it a little less funny when I realized the DNC was taking place at the Pepsi Center (I thought it was a total non-sequitur,) but it’s still awesome to see something this silly in a crowd otherwise filled with 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
Flashback: Hooters Hoax
Today’s post is the first in what will be an ongoing series where we flashback and take a look at awesome projects that while not new, are hopefully new to our readers. If not, enjoy a good idea for the second time or keep moving to the next post.
The Hooter’s Hoax took place in New York over President’s day weekend in 2006. The much loved Second Avenue Deli (a landmark for over 50 years,) had just closed in the East Village. John Grady and Mark Nickelsburg quietly put up a sign on the establishment’s front door in the middle of the night announcing a Hooters location would be soon opening. Clearly this was not going to sit well with the locals. The next day people stopped in their tracks to get a closer look at the sign, and a firestorm of speculation erupted on several NYC blogs. Some bloggers guessed it was a hoax, and others started protest sites to “stop Hooters.”
Grady writes:
Because I inadvertently pulled the prank over a three day holiday weekend (President’s Day) it had unintended consequences: the Hooters main office was not open to take calls from concerned East Village neighbors. Also, Hooters has a policy that it cannot confirm or deny where or when they are opening a new restaurant. Maybe because people would protest? I don’t know, but that definitely added fuel to the fire, when they started fielding calls and emails when they returned to the office that Tuesday.
Eventually the pranksters came clean on eater.com and the controversy came to an end. The Second Avenue Deli moved to 33rd Street, and Hooters still maintains its one New York location in midtown.
Do you know of a classic urban prank that we should cover? Let us know about it!