Dunder Mifflin is the paper company that is the office on the show “the office”.
I don’t believe that there was ever a time in the history of human commerce that selling paper by the ream to local businesses could ever have sustained the ridiculously extravagant and wasteful infrastructure portrayed in the show, including multiple local sales offices just a few hours apart, each with their own multiperson accounting department, commissions and bonuses, an HR rep on site fulltime, bigass Manhattan offices…etc. unless the paper they were selling was saturated in cocaine and heroin.
So without changing anything but the product they are selling, is there a product or product category that could realistically bring in the money needed to sustain their hideous business model?
Actually, a friend of mine grew up helping out in his grandpa’s paper business, and now runs it.
Huge deal. Massive orders, filling multiple shipping containers from paper mills in Norway and Siberia, and providing specialty papers* to printing presses in the US, Europe and Japan, really all around the world. Not just offices… so if D-M carried all sorts of paper, it’d work.
.
*Ever designed a high-end “capabilities booklet” on a premium sheet like Hahnemühle Platinum Rag? It’s gorgeous, though you (or rather your client) will pay through the nose. But they’ll look… well, capable.
I vaguely remember the days of stationery stores before Staples, Office Depot and Office Max sold stuff at a discount. The stuff was all available in the store at list price with discounts negotiated for regular customers. And the stores, even the local independent one, had a really big catalog. (I got the impression that the catalog was the same for stationery stores all over the country with the cover customized to name the local store.)
So if Dunder-Mifflin wasn’t just selling paper but all sorts of stationery, there might be enough money in it. And even in the show, Jim is shown talking to customers about exactly what sort of paper they need. It’s not just supplying cases of 20lb copier paper (which is just a commodity product).
Newsprint? Maybe not so much now, but when The Office was set? Especially if they’re selling to large regional printers who work with nationally-circulated newspapers like the New York Times or USA Today. Not to mention tabloids - the Weekly World News has to buy their paper somewhere.
I think, in the real world, they would either be a paper company or an office supply company, instead of the weird hybrid that is Dunder-Mifflin.
As a paper company, they’d wouldn’t just be selling just letter and legal sized paper by the ream, they’d be selling the production sized rolls used by magazine and newspaper publishers.
In the episode where they were freaking out over the obscene waterwork, it seemed like they were a company that manufactured paper — although it raised questions like - if you have a factory at a different location, why is your warehouse connected to your sales office? Why does your QC employee work out of the sales office instead of the factory?
But in another episode, Michael negotiated a distribution deal with Hammermill - which is something an office supply company might do. And they have a supplier relations person that exchanged sex for office supply discounts, which doesn’t make sense if all DM did was make and sell paper.
But the big thing that’s wrong with the DM business model is most manufacturers (assuming that’s what DM is) don’t maintain that kind of national network of in-house sales offices - they contract those services out to commission-based manufacturers representatives. The size of the rep agency territory varies, they may have one per state, sometimes more in large states, or they may have one for a larger regions. Those agencies may maintain multiple offices within their territories- the density of the DM sales offices never bothered me much- but I can’t see a modern company maintaining that kind of in-house sales force and remaining profitable. But of course, DM wasn’t particularly profitable, so there’s that.
There absolutely are companies in the real world like W.B. Mason and The Supply Room that are more or less Dunder Mifflin as sometimes depicted - regional-scale office supply distributors that operate directly from warehouses to business clients through a network of commissioned salespeople, don’t have retail outlets, and spend very little on advertising to the general public.
Just like with DM, they are always trying to figure out how to compete with the economy of scale that Staples and Office Depot (and Amazon and Wal-Mart) can bring on price, and the ones that succeed do so by understanding their clients’ specialized needs or providing more personal service.
It’s not that much of a stretch to imagine that a company already paying a lease on a building for warehouse space and already paying salaries and commissions to employees might choose to take on the negligible additional cost of putting those employees in the building instead of making them all work out of their cars as outside sales reps, which is what most of these businesses do (the ones with retail networks might stick a few small offices in the back of the store as well).
Paper still is a great example of something where you can turn a profit distributing it through your own network of trucks. It’s too heavy to ship through the normal mail stream efficiently, and if you need 100 cases of paper right now you really can’t just send someone down to the store and expect that they will have what you need or that your employee has any way to transport it. Owning a fleet of trucks is the key to that business. As depicted on the show, the demand for paper goes down every year as more and more office work becomes digital, but it was a lot higher when The Office started in 2005 and it’s still a need for a lot of businesses.
The needs of a fictional show mean that exactly what DM does is flexible from episode to episode, but I think we’re to understand that unless the plot requires otherwise, they are mostly selling large volumes of paper and office supplies to mid-sized businesses, and things like selling one ream at a time are done when there is time to fill in the day or their true motive for the call is to check in on their relationship with the customer rather than to make the $3 margin on a ream of paper.
And remember that the original UK show started twenty years ago, when perhaps paper was a bigger deal than today. The US show was just copying the UK original; they could just as easily have changed the business to something else.
Dunno, my parents were (smallish) newspaper publishers and their newsprint was delivered by the ton. I have no trouble imagining the executives of the paper company lived a life of luxury. It was an international concern.
There are small(ish) towns along the Wisconsin River with huge mansions built by paper company magnates back in the 1800s. Even the mid-level execs of companies like Kimberley-Clark had large homes (friends of ours bought one of those for a third the price of a house in a bigger city, and it was solidly built with timbers from the lumber mills there… the walls were a foot thick, but the rooms were huge, so the wasted space was negligible).
Years ago when I did field service, I went to a high volume newspaper press. They got a train worth of paper a day. Dozen of train cars with rolls, I dunno, five feet tall by five feet in diameter? Those were warehoused in stacks on each other about 40 feet tall like giant stack of receipt paper rolls but otherwise unsupported. The ‘aisles’ were just gaps in the stacks. Of course, I had to work in those stacks and remember thinking what would happen if a forklift knocked one over on the other side of the building. They’d domino one after another and crush me like a bug. I’d probably get soaked into a roll of paper and be on someone’s doorstep a week later.
When I was a kid, I used to climb around on those newsprint rolls, which were stacked four or five high in the back of the building that held the printing press. I remember the omnipresent roar and clatter of the press, the five gallon buckets of ink the consistency of molasses. That smell.
Those were the days before seat belts, much less car seats, of course; the idea of protecting children from uncontrolled exploration had not yet occurred.
I mean, it’s a plot point throughout the entire show that Dunder-Mifflin is a failing business. The very first episode is about how one of the branches will eventually be closed and they need to downsize. And then the company goes under partially because they spend too much money on a Manhattan office and executive salaries.
And yeah, they definitely sell more than just reams of printer paper. I remember in one episode Dwight tries to get a contract with a company that sends out catalogs.
It doesn’t even have to be newsprint. Checking around I see there is (or was) a magazine called Local Flair that distributed 20,000 copies a month “from Scranton to Stroudsburg.” The two examples I saw were 48 and 52 pages. Depending on advertising, let’s say that over a typical year the magazine averaged 40 pages per issue. That’s 10 pages of 81/2" x 17" glossy paper - a total of 2.4 million sheets per year for one, single, local publication. Now factor in all those weekly advertising supplements, throw-away flyers, employee handbooks, etc. The local printers were being kept pretty busy.
Harper Collins - a book publisher. Assume that DM has only a fraction of their business, that’s still a pretty big customer. Dwight is their sales rep.
Blue Cross of Pennsylvanua - noted as being the office’s biggest single client. Jim is their rep.
Lackawana County (where Scranton is) - Michael won the account, no idea who the rep is.
The unnamed account that represented 25% of Jim’s yearly commission, and was stolen away by Dwight.
East Pennsylvania Seminary
“White Pages” - a nameless phone book company that Jan ended up running.
Prestige Postal Company - probably a direct mail advertising company, big enough that the Scranton and Syracuse branches fought over until Andy finally won the account.
The unnamed Canadian company that was important enough that David Wallace sent Michael, Andy and Oscar all the way to Winnipeg to pitch.
Sure, there were a lot of small accounts, but these were clients that couldn’t be served by your local Office Depot.
Even small accounts can use a company like Dunder-Mifflin. I worked for a company that printed reports for clients and used cases or paper per day. Going through Staples or Office Depot would have been prohibitively expensive.
I do really like Robert California’s speech on how a company like DM could survive:
Take a look at where you are, where you once worked in a dying industry, you now work at it’s birth. Those superstores are terrified of us. Anybody know why?
Let me tell you how I buy something these days. I know what I want I go on the internet, I get the best price. Or I don’t know what I want and I go to a small store that can help me. The era of personal service is back. You are back. You’ll find that customers will pay our higher prices and then they will thank us, and we will say to them “you are welcome.”
