Why We Are Retiring the Pillsbury Doughboy (2024)

December 13, 2023

Here at Pillsbury, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire our longstanding mascot the Pillsbury Doughboy. He is a bad coworker and a relic of an office culture that is no longer acceptable in the modern era.

He is seven feet tall, smells of yeast, and sleeps in his office. His favorite activity is compressing his body into the office fridge. Being constrained in cold temperatures seems to make him more powerful, and his muffled giggles are very distracting. We are sick of being asked to poke his belly. He spends most of the time moping around, feeding pigeons with pieces of his own flesh in the parking lot. When confronted about his day-to-day activities, the Doughboy sulks and whines about how everyone is so mean to him.

Sure, it’s cute when he giggles, but it’s unbearable when he cries. The most minor request from a coworker elicits a banshee scream that drives nearby coworkers to madness. When we politely asked him to stop microwaving his fish, he shattered the breakroom windows with his wailing.

Even if the Doughboy were a product of a bygone era, it’s not our fault. We didn’t create him. In 1965, a shade of the Doughboy started to appear in the corporate office, and the more we thought about him, the more opaque it became. Within a year, the Doughboy was fully entrenched in our reality.

When he first appeared, he was only six inches tall. But he’s been growing nonstop since his genesis. In order to keep the illusion in commercials, we’ve had to use forced perspective shots that require larger and larger croissants.

Aside from the technical frustrations, shooting commercials with him is a hellish experience. On film days, he shows up late and unwashed. He never learns his lines, he’s always convinced “the giggling’s old hat,” and if we keep him in focus for more than a few seconds, the camera lens violently shatters like an overheated halogen bulb.

We believe the Doughboy has some kind of alien intelligence, with knowledge of alchemy and astrology. It’s concerning. Once on a company retreat, he made gunpowder with nothing but ash from the firepit and some strange incantations. Totally ruined bowling night.

Just because we’re firing him doesn’t mean we’re getting rid of him. In fact, last time we asked him to take a break, the staff became fatigued and pallid in his absence. It was only until he returned from his trip to Barcelona that the company-wide headaches stopped. We’ll have to keep him around the office in a plastic prison, like Magneto.

We’re worried about how best to contain him, because he can slip his body through small cracks in the wall like an octopus. He can also absorb any damage taken and return it tenfold, and morph his appendages into tools to pick locks, cut through metal, pry open doors, jam company printers, and glue our staplers to our desks.

So you see, this had to end. He still keeps us up at night. We can’t stop thinking about the way his strange, puffy body jiggles hypnotically when he dances. We can’t get the sound of his wailing and giggling out of our heads. We can’t get the smell of his microwaved fish sandwiches out of our clothes. It was time for the Doughboy to go.

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