34 Comments
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Burt Arthur's avatar

I was blessed/cursed to work retail for many years when I was younger, and there is no better introduction to the human race.

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heydave56's avatar

You jest, but there really is a condiment conspiracy afoot. Like red and yellow go together. That's what THEY want you to think!

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Stephen Beals's avatar

And yet this doesn’t surprise me at all. I won’t bother googling it because there is a conspiracy theory about everything.

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Wedersom Arantes's avatar

Each comic strip is better than the last. Congratulations and thank you for this!

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Stephen Beals's avatar

Thank you for reading!

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John Boyd's avatar

The expiry date signs made me laugh. A large supermarket near us has a pouch of rice on the shelf with a 'best before date' of December 2024. All the pouches behind it are not expired. Every week I check, and every week it remains at the front of the shelf.

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Stephen Beals's avatar

Kind of like the magazines I saw at Barnes and Noble that were over two years old. Someone hasn’t grasped the concept of not only putting the oldest in front, but also pulling the expired ones. It’s a learning curve that hopefully doesn’t include food poisoning.

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Arrietty's avatar

My dad almost ate a visibly moldy sandwich he had bought that day, so...

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Stephen Beals's avatar

Ahhh! I did take a drink from a carton of milk at a gas station which might have had an expiration date before I was born. The concerning part was that the cashier had my refund ready at the counter. She knew.

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John Boyd's avatar

Yuck, yuck, yuckity yuck yuck yuck!

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Sunshine ZombieGirl's avatar

I almost had to work a black Friday in a mall, but then I showed up to work one day at the show store, and the store was closed forever. I took it as a sign.

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DAVID's avatar

Every business I ever worked for is closed. Yes, it’s a sign.

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DAVID's avatar

I never worked in a retail store but worked in a factory where the managers too closely resembled those in your strip. I still can’t get them out of my brain even though I’ve been retired 12 years and the company no longer exits.

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Fell Choice's avatar

Dreamed last night about a place that laid me off in 2006.

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Stephen Beals's avatar

I understand that completely. Businesses only truly go away when the leave our nightmares.

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John Thompson's avatar

You're becoming the next Dave Barry, with the added bonus of comics.

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Stephen Beals's avatar

Very high praise! Dave Barry may be my only idolized comic writer who’s still living and working, but that’s only because I leapt back in time for whatever reason and latched onto James Thurber, S.J. Perlman, and Robert Benchley. James Thurber kept drawing cartoons despite becoming nearly blind. We cartoonists are a wacky bunch.

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Fell Choice's avatar

Walt Kelly was one of my all-time favorite Americans, and a heck of an artist, too.

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Stephen Beals's avatar

He was absolutely amazing.

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Karen Brenchley's avatar

I absolutely love these cartoons. I never had to work in a mall, but I did have to work in a movie theater once.

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Stephen Beals's avatar

Thank you so much. I always thought that would be a good place to work because of the free movies.

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Karen Brenchley's avatar

It was, plus the free popcorn while we worked.

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Savana's avatar

Worked in library for 8 years. I remember that we had this incredibly old check reader. It sorta reminded me of the machine used in Home Alone two when they tried to charge Kevin’s card at the hotel,

It was way out of date lol. Honestly, I only had to use it maybe 4 times the entire time I was there so needed directions every-time someone brought a check in! This was 2004-2013!

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Stephen Beals's avatar

I had the same challenge during the same time period with a fax machine. I attempted to get a sales team to stop using the fax and try this new fangled invention called an email. One salesman emailed me a picture of the paper he was going to fax.

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Savana's avatar

I remember trying to show my mother how to copy and paste on the computer, especially when writing an email. She had to be shown how to do it so many times! Now she is obsessed with facebook, and is always sending me screenshots. But she was always shocked how easy the new thing was back then!

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Stephen Beals's avatar

It probably did seem like magic. It’s addictive that way.

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Otto's avatar

Lovely cartoons. My dad was a political cartoonist in India and your work reminds me of his. Thank you for the laughs

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Stephen Beals's avatar

Thank you and cheers to your dad!

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Ërb's avatar

More rants, please.

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Lou's avatar

I spent over 30 years in retail. Worked Thanksgiving, Black Friday ect. My favorite part was when someone would call and ask to hold a " hot item" like a door buster, for a couple of hours. Now the internet has taken the fun out of that.

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Stephen Beals's avatar

I never thought people would have the nerve to ask that, but the best stories always came from people with a lot of nerve.

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Mary Braun Bates, MD's avatar

I also enjoy your cartoons very much. I never worked in a big box store, but worked at McDonald's and the local library.

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Stephen Beals's avatar

That totally counts. Libraries are the greatest, but they draw the strangest of the strange as patrons. Usually it’s a funny strange. No customer interaction stories can come near my ones from the library.

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Hobbes's avatar

My mother would be one of the loudest complainers. All to cover her half-assed, bullshit parenting.

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