Shortpacked! by David Willis
Toys are serious business.
Convention appearances:
Calgary Expo Calgary, AB: April 26-28
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
San Diego Comic-Con San Diego, CA: July 18-21
SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
San Diego Comic-Con San Diego, CA: July 18-21
SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
Multiplex
Sorcery 101
Templar, AZ
The Transformers Wiki
Hail to the Slash
80 page GIANT
Axe Cop
The Book of Biff
Butt-Taco
Comics Curmudgeon
College Roomies from Hell!!!
Diesel Sweeties
Dinosaur Comics
Dr. McNinja
Dresden Codak
Fans!
Fleen
Gastrophobia
Girl Genius
Girls with Slingshots
Goats
Hark, a vagrant
Hijinks Ensue
Intrepid Girlbot
Legend of Bill
Medium Large
Not Invented Here
Octopus Pie
Overcompensating
Penny Arcade
PhDcomics
Power Nap
Questionable Content
Real Life
Rob and Elliot
Bad Machinery
Schlock Mercenary
Sheldon
So Far Apart
Something Positive
Two Lumps
Wapsi Square
Wonderella
Wondermark
Frumph.NET
Sorcery 101
Templar, AZ
The Transformers Wiki
Hail to the Slash
80 page GIANT
Axe Cop
The Book of Biff
Butt-Taco
Comics Curmudgeon
College Roomies from Hell!!!
Diesel Sweeties
Dinosaur Comics
Dr. McNinja
Dresden Codak
Fans!
Fleen
Gastrophobia
Girl Genius
Girls with Slingshots
Goats
Hark, a vagrant
Hijinks Ensue
Intrepid Girlbot
Legend of Bill
Medium Large
Not Invented Here
Octopus Pie
Overcompensating
Penny Arcade
PhDcomics
Power Nap
Questionable Content
Real Life
Rob and Elliot
Bad Machinery
Schlock Mercenary
Sheldon
So Far Apart
Something Positive
Two Lumps
Wapsi Square
Wonderella
Wondermark
Frumph.NET
Tags
amber
animated
batman
botcon
conquest
conventions
dark of the moon
david willis
dinobot
drew
duncan
ethan
faz
galasso
generations
gijoe
guest strip
hamsters
homosexuality
jacob
jesus
joe
justice league
ken
leslie
malaya
megatron
merch
mike
ninja rick
nipple
optimus prime
politics
religion
robin desanto
ronald reagan
roz
sdcc
sg ravage
shattered glass
star wars
tni strips
transformers
transformers prime
ultra car
©2005-2013 David Willis | Powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS | Back to Top ↑
Well, it’s not like Amber can’t expect him to have gotten stuck in a toy store.
Also, I totally bet she’d be a bit too occupied to notice he’s missing.
So American department stores don’t open up extra checkout lines when the lines are getting too long?
They generally do.
That’s a relief, otherwise a faulty practice like that would end up costing them major profits.
just a guess…Eri?
Yes indeed, Eri from School Rumble.
You have clearly never been to Walmart.
Walmart is not a store. Walmart is a layer of Hell with greeters.
That good sir is an insult to Hell.
Most department stores do, but this appears to be Wal-Mart, which has 24 checkout lanes but only has about 4-5 of them open at any one time (or so it seems).
But Walmart is the biggest department chain isn’t it, how did they become the biggest if they have such bad customer practices.
Volume buying of inventory and operational practices that reduce overhead costs. That and making employees work off-the-books overtime.
AH!
As much as I hate Walmart, I’ve never heard of them making an employee work off-the-books overtime. And my wife has worked at 2 different Walmarts over the last 4 years.
Wal-Mart has been found guilty of exactly that several times over the past decades. They have paid millions of dollars in back wages and fines for failure to pay employees overtime or to provide proper meal/rest breaks. I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but they’ve done it before.
I worked there very briefly a few years ago and on closing shifts no one was allowed to leave the floor until all the customers were gone and our areas were ‘clean’. Generally my local Walmart got at least 1/2 hour of free labour per employee, per night. Definitely one of the top 3 worst jobs I’ve had.
Speaking as a Walmart employee, you could have reported those individuals to Corporate. It’s right in the company’s policy – you *can’t* work unpaid overtime.
So if you were being forced to clock out and continue working, then you’ve got grounds to go straight to corporate and get management shit canned.
It’s in policy to report such things and that such things are against the rules, but if you report it, they start looking for reason to fire you. They like the demand to work unpaid, they just can’t admit they like it for legal reasons.
My local walmart seems to be the exception you can find all the lines open at give time… but on the other side is infamous because the quick line sometimes ends at the other side of the store…
In theory they should, but if it’s anything like my store they schedule people on the basis of customer service ratings and how profitable a store is which is stupid because one of the reasons customers get pissed is there are long lines and no one to help them so we lose business and our ratings go down and get less money thus continuing the downward spiral.
This is why franchises are better than chains.
Sounds like good ol’ retail to me. I’ve never gotten to work at a franchise so maybe it’s better, but my sister works at a franchised KFC and it sounds like she has to deal with the same bs.
From an employee’s POV, it rarely makes a difference between franchises and chains.
I constantly notice the near-total lack of open lanes at groceries and retail. If the housing bubble popped and rolled the economy back a decade, why didn’t anyone roll back the minimum wage to match?
Because the cost of things didn’t go down, it’s just that a lot of people have even less money to buy them with.
It’s a balancing act. I know that at Target, lanes aren’t opened until there are more than two customers in a line, and even then there’s wiggle room if one customer doesn’t have many items, and there are no district executives looking over your shoulder.
On the other side of the coin, speaking as a front end supervisor, open registers are actually not something supervisors like to see either, because it means wasted pay, essentially. Typically, if enough cashiers are idle, I’ll actually have a couple of them restocking bags, tidying up facings, collecting coupons, or I’ll even send them to help out on the floor.
Essentially, there’s pressure not to have more than one or two open lanes at any time, and there’s a balance that has to be struck there.
Shadlyn Wolfe has it right, but there’s also this:
Corporate profits are very close to an all-time high.
In the meantime, hiring is still disturbingly low (a little better than it was last year, but, especially in summer months, quite low), and minimum wage is proportionately really, REALLY low. If we adjust for the level of inflation and cost of goods and services, the average joe’s minumum wage in the 60s would be the equivalent of $9 or $10 per hour in today’s money, instead of slightly over $7 like it actually is today.
It has nothing to do with minimum wage being “affordable” to large chains. It has everything to do with large chains being cheapskates to begin with, and literally trying to get by with as few employees as possible at any given moment.
If the minimum wage were lowered with no other changes, I guarantee you would not see terribly much more hiring with the big chains – just even higher profits.
They CAN afford to hire more people for a shift. They just don’t want to.
I know this, because I am living on that side of it. I work in a store-within-a-store as it were (both owned by the same company, separate I think for tax reasons). We’re not allowed to be open all the hours that the main store is, because they only want to pay for one part time and one full-time employee, instead of the two full-timers and floating part-timers that they’re SUPPOSED to have – unless we were to magically, during this slow season I might add, be impossibly profitable, which won’t happen because a good chunk of the time we miss customers because we aren’t there early enough or late enough and corporate doesn’t want to make themselves look bad by actually being reasonable enough to list hours for the department. Yes, really.
In the meantime, the rest of the store has 8 registers for cashiering, which trust me is fairly proportional given the size of the store, and never seems to put more than one or two people on cashier even on days when they KNOW it’s one of the Busy Days and corporate has put out a bajillion crazy coupons and there are several really good sales, all of which add to the number of customers who will need to get checked out. They also resist the idea of keeping employees past closing time to recover, because omg! That would be more hours!
The number one request over the walkies at work is for more cashiers up front, but they still expect to have THOUSANDS of objects recovered/faced/stocked/measured out. Without scheduling anyone extra. Or keeping us past closing.
The result? The store is NEVER completely recovered, and the lines are always absurdly long, and the #1 complaint about our store is wait times.
It’s been like this for MONTHS and the store still manages a decent profit.
Corporate does not care. Trust me.
The only way I think anybody would do anything about those situations is if a lot of customers complained to corporate at once, threatening to stop shopping there. Then they might get alarmed and put pressure on the store manager.
But without that kind of pressure, they already skimp on hours as much as possible, even when they’re doing well.
Lowering minimum wage wouldn’t do a damn thing to fix that. All it would do is make sure wages are artificially and unhealthily low in proportion with cost of goods and services. It would hurt the little guy without doing a damn thing to change the way corporate “helps” the customer.
If it’s anything like the Target I’m a supervisor at, they schedule according to two metrics: transactions per hour and back-up requests. Essentially, the scheduling system analyzes what kind of traffic is expected in a given hour on a given day of the week at a given time of year, and attempts to have the appropriate number of cashiers available for that hour. These numbers are adjusted if during that hour, a significant number of back-up requests are logged by the cashiers. This is, of course, balanced against payroll budget, which is determined by daily sales volume. Granted, Wal-Mart may be different.
It could also be a case of working with a skeleton crew at night. There aren’t more registers open because A) there simply aren’t enough people to monitor them and B) counting down a cash register takes time. Once a lane is closed, cashed out, and counted for the night, that’s it. It stays closed. Because the people running the place generally know how much time each one will take, and can’t just open one on a whim.
During the day, no, yeah, they usually open a new line if that happens.
It’s actually been my experience that only the self-checkouts are open after a certain hour, and you can’t get a live cashier to save your life. I farkin’ hate self-checkouts.
Every time I go to the Apple Valley Walmart after midnight, the self-checkouts are all closed and only one cashiered register is open with a monster line. RAGE.
The real wierd thing here is that they’re closing the self service checkouts. They have to pay the cashiers, you think they’d close that.
My thinking is, why close a register when someone has been waiting for it already? That is a HUGE no-no as far as I’m concerned. I’d have demanded the manager come over; you can close a register behind the last person, but not in front of someone who’s already waited.
This is something that was moreless indicated by my bosses when I worked the self-check out lanes at my store: Do not close down all lanes when there’s someone waiting.
My store, however, closed at 11, and the self-check lines closed at that time. We ran 12 self-checks and up to 16 (4 express, 12 normal) main lines at peak at the front-end. By 1030, only one, maybe two mainlines would be open, and the 6 remaining self-checks were closing one by one from 10 to 11, often times with 3 still open to the bitter end.
Speaking to Shade’s comment, the store’s still paying someone to run those self-check stations. That cashier just happens to be operating 4, 6 or even 10 or 12 checkstands at once! And I’ve seen setups where a cashier will be running a mainline AND a four station self-check terminal from the mainline.
Also, don’t forget, some people will flat out REFUSE to use Self Checkout. Damn this thread is giving me flashbacks.
They have to pay a person to stand at the self checkout terminal too, to monitor all the checkouts.
Still stupid. The Walmart near me does this every night, and has yet to pick up on the fact that there are tons of people who work second and third shift who shop late. So annoying having to spend 20 minutes in line because the 5 people sorting returns can’t open a register.
Good thing the bus is late huh?
It got a flat tire….or two
By the time Ethan gets there, that kid is going to look just like she did waiting for the bus.
*plays Jeff Beck’s “Ambitious” over the store’s Muzak*
Also, totally off-topic here but congrats on the massive success of your Kickstarter!
CLONES ON PARADE.
There’s no god…
…only the All-Spark.
I sense some serious character development for Ethan on the horizon….
Two hours, the baby’s still got a while to go.
Welp, Ethan, shoulda gone with the trusty ol’ “stick this toy somewhere no one else will ever find it, return tomorrow” route.
why was my first thought about butts?
Well that’s one way to make sure nobody ever finds it.
However, if you could find one large enough to hide the figure in, would you really want it by the time you came back to it?
He appears to be in a Walmart. Finding a gigantic butt will not be a problem.
You’ve been infected with BUTTS DISEASE!
Or, y’know, just steal it. We already know Ethan’s no stranger to committing crimes (See: Kidnapping Galasso.). Just sayin’.
So would this be Sophie’s Choice or Murphy’s Law happening here?
Sophie’s Choice about Murphy’s Law.
I would be interested to see Ethan dealing with the consequences of stealing the toy.
And all I want to see of it is Ethan making his one phone call to Robyn or Lez.
I thought about that, but…stealing Alfred? You…you just can’t do it, man. That’s about as morally bankrupt as you can get.
His absurd cockney accent would admonish you all the way to the lock-up.
Great, now I’m imagining Alfred taking over Roadblock’s role.
This needs to be a strip.
I really can’t see Ethan stooping so low as to steal toys.
Locking his boss up in a video game cage and running the store for several months in order to preserve his crappy retail job, sure. That makes sense.
But stealing a toy, no.
Wouldn’t they close the line and not let more people into it as it was approaching 10 o’clock? I don’t shop at Wal*Mart. So, I don’t know how they do things. (OK… I do go to the Vision Center at the one on Morse Rd.) But, usually, stores won’t just kick people out of line after they’ve been waiting. I hate to be pedantic. But, it’s just had to suspend disbelief and feel for the character(s) when the situation seems so implausible.
I do hope you are aware of the irony in that last statement.
I feel like I’m supposed to be thinking, “Poor Ethan! He just can’t get a break.” But, I’m thinking, “This is BS! They would never kick him out of the line like that!”
In most cases, in stores I’ve been in and worked in, the cashier on duty will announce that he or she is closing, and won’t allow new people to get in line, but WILL allow everyone who is already in line before the announcement to complete their purchase. It certainly seemed like Ethan was already in line yesterday. Third, right behind the homophonic guy. But I suppose it’s possible Ethan missed the cashier’s announcement when he first got in line when the guy started talking to him, and this is the cashier telling him again, personally
Nothing ever goes right for Ethan. It’s a rule.
the most implausible thing to me is that he’s been waiting in line for two hours. i know standing in line at walmart is a pain, but even the worst ones would have you checked out in half an hour, tops. if it’s a self checkout the wait is reduced dramatically, because the station can accomodate several people at a time.
Or that with that many customers still in the store, they’d only keep one line open. Nope, sorry, would never happen, especially if they’re in that big a hurry to close the registers and lock up. If Ethan was in line for 2 whole hours, that means that cashier, the manager on duty and various other store employees had to keep working till the line was cleared out.
And by then, well, I would want to have to deal with the angry and likely openly hostile customers who had to wait that long on line.
Couldnt he go to the customer service desk? The Wallyworld near me lets people who have 3 or less items just go there if its busy at the other tills or really slow.
(to you and Demetrius above)
Yes, but that wouldn’t be contrived, er, I mean, funny.
That’s the rule of Butt Monkeys for you. Nothing can ever, ever go well for them. EVER. And since Ethan was gay because Willis didn’t want to pair him with Amber, I’d say he counts.
From Willis’s statements, I’d say that’s a simplification at best. That’s the only reason Willis decided to have his main character be gay?
That, and in a year or so Ethan’s gonna have a mental breakdown and discover that Roadblock is his true love….
Perhaps that line is the customer service desk.
Walmarts here (OK) do the exact opposite. When it gets late they leave only the self-checkouts open.
That is my job. That is literally what I do. Self-checkout. And we close at 10. But the difference is that if you have a full cart of groceries at 10pm, something is wrong with you and you deserve the inconvenience.
Or maybe the person has an odd work schedule that doesn’t let them out until like, 9pm or so. You never know.
Assuming they work a job that is legal in the US, they should have time during the day to shop then.
Seriously? If a store is OPEN 24 hours, why on earth do you think it’s only acceptable for people to do their shopping during the day?
There’ve been times I was a midnight shopper just to avoid the crowds.
When I was working afternoons at the wheat pool, I got off at 11 PM. I then had the choice of shopping at almost midnight (it taking me half an hour, even with the streets empty, to get home), when I was tired, but if I got held up wouldn’t be late for work– or trying to get up early enough the next morning to eat, get my lunch/dinner made, clean the house, and still go shopping, get home, and pack everything away before I had to head out to work again. And with daytime traffic I had to leave a little after 1 to get to work for 3, and shopping could take ridiculously long because everything was so busy. I once grabbed a block of cheese (I went to make sandwiches and discovered I was out) and went through the express lane to pay for it, and that alone took forty minutes. So it was very difficult to balance getting my shopping taken care of early enough to get to work on time, and still get a decent amount of sleep. Any kind of a social life while I was on that shift was pretty much right out.
So that schedule led me to be doing my shopping at mightnight where possible, and I can assure you that in both Canada (where I am) and in the States, working at a wheat pool is perfectly legal. I had friends who worked late as security guards and other perfectly legal evening jobs who were in the same boat as me.
So… “wheat pool” DOESN’T mean something dirty in Canada?
Well… only if the grain gets wet and starts rotting, ha ha.
It’s the place where all the grain from the Prairies gets cleaned and stored, and then loaded onto ships. Or just gathered in from the farmers and shipped off to our pool from the Prairies, if you’re at that end of the distribution.
I have the same job, but still, even as much as I hate it/the customers/etc… If you have a customer at the head of a line you need to close, you do not fucking send them to the back of another line. That’s just… no.
I wish Ethan had a little less perturbed face and a little more lecturing on customer service going on.
I was going to say.
When fastlane closes there are two other lanes still open and I want to go home. There should never BE a line at fastlane because there are four of them. The only people who check out on fastlane are people who do not want to talk to a human being, and often times it’s because they plan on shoplifting the non-food merchandise that their EBT card won’t pay for. So when the antisocialites are waiting for the self-checkout, the real-people lanes are usually just sitting there waiting for customers, so I refuse to feel guilty.
I buy ALL my groceries self-checkout, thanks, and I have never shoplifted anything in my life. I a) like my bags packed a certain way, b) bring my own reusable bags and those still confuse half the checkers and c) prefer not to make casual small-talk with a checker.
And I just realized you’re the same guy I responded to last time. Dammit, I’m feeding trolls.
*puts up a No Feeding the Trolls sign* There you go. I’m here to help!
I sometimes work my store’s self check out area and what tickles me most about this comic is that in order to close the check out I swipe a white tag that has a barcode on it. It looks a lot like what the clerk is holding, but it also has a magnetic key (to get security lids off bottles of alcohol and open those locked things that hold electronic items, earphones, etc) and some regular keys attached to it. For those of you who don’t work in retail, part of the reason self checkouts get closed at certain times despite people wanting to use them is that the manager has to count the cash in the machine and reload the dollars and change before they end their shift. There’s a time limit on it.
Well that sounds… “efficient”.
I’d imagine it’s as efficient as possible given the rules mandated by the corporation.
Which means “not very,” if the corporation is as large and bureaucratic as Wal Mart. The fact is, as companies grow, there become more and more layers of management that one is held accountable to.
predicting that the rest of the week will be Ethan-waiting-in-line comics. we won’t see the hospital again until next wednesday.
I’m predicting that at one point, Ethan will be standing next to Amber’s daughter waiting for the (perpetually late) bus.
Ah, I see where this is going.
I was afraid of this.
Drew’s behavior in their relationship’s final days wasn’t ideal, but Ethan seemed to react to the criticism by retreating from his position in earlier years, where he wondered if he really had some sort of problem, to defending his “identity” as a “harmless hobby.” Now there’s no Drew around to justify himself against. There’s just his best friend, whom he’s not there for.
It’s time to grow up, Ethan. Or, y’know, not.
But are we allowed to judge Ethan’s behavior by our moral standards, when he clearly lives in a world where probabilities are literally and frequently (if not constantly) biased against him by narrative causality?
Can we accuse the Coyote of fault when God Himself is out to get him, and inevitably will?
That’s not the same thing at all, I’m afraid. The Coyote isn’t given many choices in life, and he only has one goal: food.
Sure, it was Ethan’s bad luck that the toy he wanted was a two-hour-plus wait. It’s Ethan’s choice to wait those two hours, when he knows full well they could be two of the most important hours in Amber’s life.
I’m not completely unsympathetic, but only because this will end up hurting him more than Amber in the end, and because I think he really does have a problem. Even Roadblock knows it.
Actually, even as a kid it occurred to me, the Coyote DID have other choices in the matter. If he has the money to order all that crap from ACME and can get mail service to receive it, he can just as easily have food delivered to him.
Seriously though, if this DOES have bad consequences for him, and isn’t just treated as a joke when Ethan gets to the hospital, and you’re so convinced he has a problem, then maybe he needs for it to happen to motivate him to change.
Otherwise, like Drew, you’re just nagging about something that none of the other characters see as a real problem. I mean Ethan’s toy collecting habits have usually mirrored Willis’s own. Does he see himself as an addict?
That’s the thing, though – Willis appears to have just as much of a problem with obsessive toy hoarding as Ethan does. Both of them have a serious problem with collecting stuff they don’t need and never use, and neither of them will admit it.
I long for the day where Ethan actually admits it’s a serious issue and I get to watch all the obvious toy collectors on this site frantically attempt to justify themselves in the comments. “No, no, it’s just a harmless hobby! It definitely isn’t a never-ending stopgap for the huge emotional hole that I have in my life!”
Ah, the sweet wafting smell of a load of slowly decomposing bullcrap…
Willis very, very obviously doesn’t have a “serious problem” – he wants to buy toys, he can afford to buy toys, he buys toys, and no negative consequences occur. This is only a problem if you are of the opinion that the toys themselves are inherently evil, perhaps that they are the demon spawn of Hastur or something, which is frankly delusional.
And this “don’t need and never use” is an interesting phrase. It speaks of a complete inability to comprehend enjoying something. Willis obviously derives frequent and constant enjoyment from his Hot Shot shrine. It’s like a pillar of pure joy that stands in his living room and emanates happy waves. It’s like a drug that you only have to pay for once and which has no negative side effects or medical downsides (aside from being addictive). To state that toys are useless to collectors is to stand staring in frank incomprehension at the facts of the situation.
Plus, it makes me wonder what you think of other things. I have a lot of DVDs of movies. Like with my toys the only enjoyment I derive from them is by sitting around looking at them for a while. (I get considerably more enjoyment from my toys actually, dollar for dollar; I constantly pick them up and transform and fiddle with them.) Similarly fine art is useless, all music is pointless, and recreational sex is completely unnecessary (as are relationships, really).
So yes, toys are not needed or used when you want to pound in a nail – but then, they’re not hammers. And sometimes, yes, there are other things you want to do other than pound in nails.
If you are going to divest yourself of everything you don’t actually need then you will be down to two changes of clothing and a mat on the floor.
Ask yourself how much you “need” the computer and Internet connection you’re using to read this. Wouldn’t a Windows 98 system with 500 meg and a dial-up service also allow you to read it? heck, comes to it, do you need to sit here reading webcomics?
Do you really need to have a water heater? Or a flush toilet? Or as many pants/shoes/shirts as you have? Do you need cable/satellite/Netflix? Or that DVD/Blu-Ray player?
Ethan doesn’t spend a lot of money on the latest fashions. He isn’t seeing movies every week, or eating out constantly (from what we’ve seen). Pretty much his only ‘splurging” seems to be on toys. So what?
He’s not choosing between buying Alfred and groceries, or paying his rent. He’s not coming in late to work because he’s obsessively tracking something down online (or re-editing the Transformers wiki again). He’s not displacing furniture because his collection is taking over his place.
All he’s doing is collecting and displaying toys. Big deal. If it was baseball/hockey cards, or military memoribilia, or, heck, unicorn figures, no one ould be blinking an eye. He’s hardly an addict struggling desperately to control an obbession that is threatening to consume his life. See Jacob for the contrast.
Shortpacked is full of instances of a not-unlike-the-author collector buying things he doesn’t need and being called out on it, sometimes by himself, yet you say the author “doesn’t admit it”? He doesn’t need to add a final panel to this strip saying “And Ethan made a terrible choice!” to get his point across.
I’ve never met David Willis, but I think it’s fairly obvious from his website that he pokes fun at his own habits all the time. That’s a hard thing to do if you’re blind to them.
I’ve never met David Willis, but I think it’s fairly obvious from his website that he pokes fun at his own habits all the time. That’s a hard thing to do if you’re blind to them.
Apparently, cloning a paragraph is not such a hard thing to do.
And what I’m trying to say is, granting a fictional character the illusion of free will and independent agency for the sake of argument, is it fair to blame him for making bad decisions if a mocking God twists and biases all outcomes against him regardless?
He’s not abandoning his friend in her hour of need. He’s simply trying to grab this one thing that he’s been looking for for ages which he had in his hand when he got the call that she was going into labour.
He isn’t her ride to the hospital. He’s a friend who she hopes will be there when she pops the kid out. Which, this being a first child, will on average be eighteen hours from when he was first called. Which means that, even with the two-hour delay, he’s got roughly another sixteen hours of sitting in that waiting room.
Let the poor guy finish his purchase, already!
Stuff the damn doll behind the least popular item in the store and get to the hospital you twit.
Also, I keep seeing Ethan in panel two as having a moustache.
FFFFFFFF-
Now I cant unsee that. Cheers.
I’m glad to know that I was not the only one to see the moustache
As a woman who has given birth, I can say that unless this one is unusually fast, Ethan has about 10 more hours to get there before the pushing starts. typically that’s how long the hospital will give you once your water breaks before they go in and get the little bugger. Unless you go the midwife route, then you might be allowed to take longer. Its pretty much a day-long event… Oh, joy.
A friend of mine’s daughter had her first child with a midwife recently and it took four days. D: My first was 18 hours from the first pangs to “It’s a boy!”
Yeah, you’re looking at close to a 24-hour event. Even if the line is long he’s got time to pick up the damned toy. He can grab her a milkshake or what on the way over and all will be well.
Not to mention, based on my experience with recent fatherhood, that the hospital strongly discourages anyone else but the father/partner from being in the delivery room until the baby’s good and born.
I thought he was supposed to be at Meijer. Not to spoil the joke, but Meijer closes all the CLERK lanes at night, leaving ONLY the self scans open.
why didn’t ethan just check out at the electronics department? the regsiters over there never have a line.
Yanno, I asked that question a bit down, but considering I work there, I had to think it over a little.
Basically, by ten, there’s only one or two people working that department, one of the two being from the overnight shift, who is in more than one area till 7 AM in the morning, while the other one is a left over from the day shift, working till about 10:30 or 11 or midnight. So both are usually tidying up and setting out the new merchandise for tomorrow, or going over to say, hardware or fabrics, to help customers that need their help as well, and won’t be a guarantee to help the customer check out.
I speak, of course, on past experience.
Ethan, Ethan, Ethan… if ever in life there is a time to play the “I only have one item” card to get to the head of a queue it’s when you also have the “my best friend is in labour” waiting in your hand.
Countered by the ‘yeah right you liar’ and ‘of all the immoral things to lie about’ combo, which is a killer.
Is that what life is like in the US? Wow.
The Wal-Mart in my area no longer has self checkouts. They caused a lot of trouble due to customers either taking advantage of the lack of supervision, or an inability to learn the skill set needed to scan and bag items – that is, that you HAVE to bag the item properly and wait for the computer to catch up. I once watched as a woman scanned a jacket, hung it back on her cart, and slid 4 other items over the scanner while it was stuck at the “please bag your item” prompt. When she saw what was going on finally, she hit the “skip bag” button… then hit finish and paid. For the ONE ITEM.
Besides that, this particular store is the busiest Wal-Mart in the area. And it almost never has more than 5 checkouts open. It’s not uncommon to have to wait behind (no joke) 30 people before being able to pay and leave. The head manager refuses to hire more cashiers either, because paying more people would mean less of a monthly bonus for himself. The other managers are quite often run ragged.
It’s kinda like K-Mart, except the one near me has NO fast lanes and they only ever have one or two lanes open full of old folks with twenty coupons they have to fish for. Hence the reason I so rarely look for toys there. I mean, they MIGHT have what I want…but then I actually have to go through the process of buying it.
But seriously, in Ethan’s case: There are so very few toys that I have not seen a second time. That’s a big step toward recovering from this folley – you WILL see it again, most likely. There are so many figures that I just had to have that moment and I just KNEW I wouldn’t find it again…only to see it months later in a clearance rack. Set it down and be patient.
There’s also hiding it but…well come on, who doesn’t know that tactic? I’ve found a good swath of hidden figures; sometimes it’s the only way to find the sought-after ones.
Is it weird that whenever I see Ethan and Leslie I think it just adds to the “bromance” aspect of their relationship. Leslie is the snark to Ethan’s straight-man. (And please, no terrible jokes.)
I can ship to this.
Well, if we can ship 2 striaght characters into a homosexual relationship, why can’t we ship 2 gay characters into a hetrosexual relationship. Equality! XD
Ethan think about it is Alfred really worth it?
YES.
Alfred is worth everything. Without Alfred there would be no Batman.
What store closes a register on someone who was already in line for it?
Why doesn’t Ethan just stash Alfred in another section and go back and pick it up later. C’mon dude, it’s Wal-Mart they won’t notice!
Just go to Electronics, Ethan. There’s always someone over there, and that’s usually where the people with two or less items check out anyway.
poor ethan he is just about out of the place with alfred so he can be there for amber popping out her little bundle only to be stopped hope he manage to still make it to the birth. or will not hear the end of it from amber
Why do I see Ethan ending up stealing it and getting arrested?
Just give up. Friends are more important. Go for the toy, and you will find out the hard way. Guaranteed: Murphy’s Law!