Funny store signs in Exeter

I know I’m not the only one who has wondered about the identity of the person who comes up with the signs outside Foy Insurance on Portsmouth Avenue.

They beg the question, is Andy Grigas, the well-known sign guy at Arjay Ace Hardware, moonlighting.

I was not alone in thinking this.

“I’ve had several people ask,” Andy said this week, adding he noticed the clever signs outside the insurance office earlier this year, “it kind of inspires me to push harder.”

As in a bit of sign slogan competition?

“It’s possible,” Andy joked. “I was kind of thinking of some stuff last night. I’ve got another one ready to go.”

Some of Andy’s greatest hits include “We’re so happy we wet our plants” and “Save a garden, eat a cow” to advertise a sale on grills.

The sign that really caught my eye at Foy’s this summer was “Congrats Exeter’s Mega Million Winner. FYI You Need More Insurance.” For the record, they say this did not result in the winner coming in to sign up for insurance.

Andy liked the sign they had up during the UFO Festival, letting the aliens know they could use their “star bucks” to buy coffee at Dunkin Donuts.

But if not Andy, then just who is behind the signs at the insurance office? Well, turns out it’s a family affair, led by Mike Foy, who is also Exeter famous for being the last customer to eat breakfast at Rogan’s when the Exeter restaurant closed in 2016.

“I think I drove by a sign at a church and it was something funny, I said we should do that at our office, that would be kind of cool,” Mike said this week, adding he gets inspiration from many sources. “The hard part is the limited space.”

This week’s sign is simple: Irony the Opposite of Wrinkly.

Mike gets help from his nephew Nick and others in the office, who all like to get in on the fun.

“Insurance isn’t always the talk of the town, so we said let’s make some fun of it,” Nick said. “Humor is definitely one of the top ways to get people’s attention and draw interest. For every time a person says they don’t like it, five people do.”

And while some of the signs came down quickly, like the question about what differentiated a male and female snowman (look it up), others generated a lot of feedback, Nick said, like “You Can’t Buy Happiness, But You Can Buy a Dog.”

“The ones that people can all relate to are the ones that draw the most attention,” he said.

Speaking of dogs, also in the running in Exeter’s sign game is the Epping Road Veterinary Hospital, which has a question on one side and the answer on the other. This week’s question, what is a dog that designs buildings? Answer: A barkitect. I love their signs, except that I’m too impatient to wait to drive back the other way, so am always trying to read the answer in my rearview mirror as I pass by. Thankfully, my super mom multi-tasking abilities have prevented me from crashing when I do this.

Like the Arjay signs, the Foy signs generate buzz around town. “I’ll wear a Foy Insurance hat and people who know me will say, ‘Do you work there? Who does the sign?’ Obviously, people who know me will comment on a sign or send an email,” Mike said, adding one friend said they laughed so hard at a sign they almost crashed.

For Nick, the third generation to work at the business, the signs are way to connect to the community, which is in line with their philosophy.

“We want to be part of the community as opposed to being in the background,” Nick said, adding other signs promote community events, like the duck race at the Beer and Chili Fest this weekend. “I think it’s nice for me personally to have a connection with the business.”

The ongoing Arjay signs have played a similar role for Andy and the store. The Exeter native started working at the store after he graduated high school in 1994. He liked the culture and kept moving up the ranks. While he doesn’t remember exactly when he started creating the sign slogans, he does remember the first one he came up with. It was Thanksgiving week and he wrote that when the tryptophan wore off, people could attend a Black Friday sale at the store. Customers started remarking on the signs almost immediately when they came into the store and owner Dan Jackson told Andy to keep doing what he was doing.

The creative minds behind Exeter’s signs have all found that not everyone shares their sense of humor. Andy recalls a sign about “puck your roof” he came up with to promote deicing roof pucks that pushed the boundaries too far. While Mike Foy said not everyone got the joke about every day after Tuesday each week being called WTF. What, you didn’t realize it was Wednesday, Thursday, Friday?

“We get used to people calling about almost every sign that’s any bit controversial,” Mike said, adding most recent feedback came from the sign seeing vegetable puns with the request to “lettuce know” resulting in a phone call “The next morning, a guy calls and says, “I just have to complain, that’s kind of corny.”

It was also ripe for some reaction from Exeter’s original sign guy Andy. His responses to the sign: “come back tomato” followed by “let’s not get carrot away” and “don’t get cuke with me.”

I don’t know about you, but I think Exeter’s two sign guys make a good pear.

Lara Bricker is a former staff writer for the Exeter News-Letter, the author of two books of non-fiction and an Exeter resident. She can be reached at larabricker@hotmail.com on Facebook at Lara Bricker Author or on Twitter @larabricker.