Concord — Back when it was legal to advertise their products, the folks at Mail Pouch Tobacco came up with an ingenious marketing campaign. Knowing their customer base was mostly rural, they painted enormous Mail Pouch signs on barns across the country.
They would offer to give the entire barn a fresh coat of paint and then give the farmer a few bucks every month to have their message painted in huge letters on the side: “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco: Treat Yourself to the Best.”
The marketing campaign started way back in 1891 and at its peak in the 1960s, there were about 20,000 Mail Pouch barns in 22 states, including Michigan. In addition to the barns, they also painted their signs on quite a few buildings across the land.
The campaign stopped in 1992 and most Mail Pouch signs have either faded away or the barns have fallen down.
But there’s one sign still standing on a building in a small town in Michigan, and it’s the most famous Mail Pouch Tobacco sign in the country. That’s because the guy who once owned the building decided to change the message a bit.
It now reads, “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco: Treat Yourself to Cancer.”
You’ll find the sign in downtown Concord, a village in southern Michigan, just southwest of Jackson. The surgeon general’s spirit is alive and well here.
The original sign was painted 80 or 90 years ago on the building at the corner of Main Street and Homer Road, but the “cancer” edit was made in 2002.
According to a 2004 story in the Jackson Citizen-Patriot, the building was owned at the time by a Concord businessman named Brad Smith, and he’s the one who decided to change the message.
“I just was not comfortable with that message being up there,” Smith told the paper. “I feel comfortable with the change. I’m very aware that cancer is a killer.”
Smith said that once he bought the building, he never thought about painting over the entire sign, since it had become such a fixture in downtown Concord. “It’s part of the history of this town,” he said. But he also wanted everyone in town, particularly the kids, to know that chewing tobacco is an awful habit to take up, so he decided to turn it into a surgeon general’s warning.
The building was sold in 2021, and the current owners have kept the sign as is, so it’s still the first thing you see when you drive through downtown Concord.
The natural question is: Has the messaging worked? Do people in Concord think twice about sticking a pinch between the cheek and gums?
To find out, we checked with the folks at the Sunoco station in Concord, just a few doors down from the Mail Pouch sign. In addition to gas, they sell pop, snacks, auto parts… and yep, chewing tobacco.
Has the “Treat Yourself to Cancer” sign stopped people from buying chewing tobacco there?
“I don’t think so,” the woman behind the counter said. “We sell a lot of it. I don’t like it myself, but to each his own.”
That’s right: to each his own. Whether you’re treating yourself to the best or treating yourself to cancer, it’s still a free country.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
