Overview
A fourth-season episode, "Dunder Mifflin Infinity", said the company was founded in 1949 by Robert Dunder (John Ingle) and Robert Mifflin, initially to sell brackets for use in construction. The fifth-season episode "Company Picnic" said that the co-founders met on a tour of Dartmouth College. U.S. News & World Report likens it to many actual companies in its size range: "It is facing an increasingly competitive marketplace. Like many smaller players, it just can't compete with the low prices charged by big-box rivals like Staples, OfficeMax and Office Depot, and it seems to be constantly bleeding corporate customers that are focused on cutting costs themselves."[10] The show's creators share this assessment—"It's basically a Staples, just not as big", says co-producer Kent Zbornak[11]—as do some of those companies. "Since Dunder Mifflin could be considered among our competitors", says Chuck Rubin, an Office Depot executive, "I think Michael Scott is actually the perfect person to run their Scranton office."[12] The company was depicted as based in New York City, with branches in smaller Northeastern cities. Episodes are set in the Scranton branch, but other branches have been mentioned and seen. The now-closed Stamford, Connecticut branch was seen when Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) transferred there during the first half of the third season.[13] Another episode, "Branch Wars", gave viewers a brief glimpse of the Utica branch, one of several purportedly in upstate New York. Zbornak says that the city was on the shortlist for where to base the show, with some of its writers having ties to Central New York, and that they always intended for at least a branch office to be located there, for reasons of phonetics. "Utica was just such a different-sounding name than Scranton", Zbornak says. But also, "we had done a little research and thought our kind of business could survive in Utica."[11]
A Buffalo branch has been mentioned in several episodes,[14] and a Rochester office was also mentioned in the episode titled "Lecture Circuit". The Dunder Mifflin website also lists a Yonkers branch. Albany is yet another mentioned New York location, which in a deleted scene in "Stress Relief" is revealed to have closed. It is also said that there are branches in other states, including: Akron, Ohio; Camden, New Jersey; and Nashua, New Hampshire.[15] In "Company Picnic", it is announced that the Camden and Yonkers branches have closed and that the Buffalo branch is about to close. In "Boys and Girls", a Pittsfield, Massachusetts branch was mentioned by Jan as having been shut down when their warehouse workers unionized. The episode "Turf War" focuses on the closing of the Binghamton branch and how reps from the Syracuse branch are competing with Scranton employees for Binghamton's old clients.
Business writer Megan Barnett has pointed out parallels between Dunder Mifflin and the real-life W.B. Mason paper company based near Boston, in Brockton, Massachusetts. It is similarly regional in focus, serving corporate and institutional customers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Like Dunder Mifflin, its original product line (rubber stamps) was something other than paper, and it faced stiff competition from national and international chains. It, too, has a branch office in Stamford, but Mason's has remained open. In 2009, it had an accounting scandal that resulted in a $545,000 payment to corporate customers, much as Dunder Mifflin had to deal with the arrest of Ryan Howard for fraud the year before.[16]
Depiction of corporate culture
The company's "clearly dysfunctional" top-down management style is a major source of tension on the show, notes Chicago-based writer Ramsin Canon. Corporate headquarters rejects the television commercial Michael created, as he, in turn, insisted on his ideas for the commercial.[17][18] Ryan Howard (B. J. Novak), who began as a temp, becomes Michael's new boss because he has an M.B.A. despite never having sold any paper or paper products.[19] The show's depiction of a dysfunctional corporate culture has led some commentators to liken Dunder Mifflin to the software maker Initech in Mike Judge's cult comedy Office Space[20] and the nameless company in which the Dilbert comic strip is set.[12]
