Have a Nice Day

1970

Date: 1970-1972 · Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · Figures: Bernard Spain, novelty wholesaler · Murray Spain, novelty wholesaler · Harvey Ball, smiley creator · Tags: Catchphrase, Bumper, Seventies 01. The Spain Brothers Brothers Bernard and Murray Spain run a small novelty wholesale operation out of Philadelphia. In September 1970 they pair Harvey Ball's unregistered yellow smile with the phrase Have a Nice Day on a button. They register the combined design and order an initial run from a New Jersey button manufacturer. By the end of 1971 they have sold an estimated twenty million units. By 1972, fifty million. Wholesale price: about three cents per button. 02. Saturation and Backlash The phrase appears on mugs, ashtrays, T-shirts, postcards, McDonald's bags, gas station receipts, and bumper stickers. By 1973 it is the standard sign-off of supermarket cashiers from Florida to Oregon. The phrase precedes the corporate scripting; the corporate scripting reinforces the phrase. Cynical reuse begins almost immediately. In 1972 Underground Press Syndicate papers run the smiley with a bullet hole between the eyes. Watchmen's 1986 cover image, a smiley with a blood smear, is a direct response to the 1970 saturation. "We must have sold fifty million buttons by 1972. We weren't artists. We were button guys.", Murray Spain, interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, 1996 Sources • Susan Strasser, 'Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market' (Pantheon, 1989) • Daniel J. Boorstin, 'The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America' (Atheneum, 1962, reissued 1992) • Philadelphia Inquirer, 'The Spain Brothers and the Yellow Smile', 14 April 1996