September 7th, 2013

Against the Wall

by Wayno & Piraro

Bizarro is brought to you today by Hell On Earth.

This cartoon is meant to be about stores in general that broadcast TV commercials where everyone is beautiful and happy. But with the overweight old guy greeting customers and the badly-dressed, obese customer, it distinctly resembles a Walmart. (For my European and Asian readers, that’s a chain of stores the size of an indoor soccer stadium that sell everything you can imagine: clothes, appliances, electronics, furniture, carpets, shoes, tools, soap, prepackaged and fresh foods, guns, ammo, tires, sporting equipment, prescription drugs, you name it. They have prices so low that they drive all of the independently owned stores in the community out of business, then the owners and employees of those stores typically have to work for Walmart, because all of the other jobs are gone and they can no longer afford to shop anywhere else. Sort of American capitalism’s version of debtor’s prison.)

So my point is that this morning I went to another so-called “big box store” like Walmart, named Costco, to get a cheap eye exam. (Costco, reportedly, at least pays their employees a decent wage, which Walmart infamously does not. Also, the eye doc I visited only has his office there, he’s not an employee of Costco.) Just being there among the herds of mooing humans pushing gigantic shopping carts full of gigantic products made me fear for my soul. I don’t actually even believe in souls but I’d swear some aspect of my essence was being sucked out of me and cast spiraling down into Hell. When I returned to my car in their massive, black-top parking lot, the temperature on my dashboard read 114 degrees.  So I might be onto something.

REZARRO: Here’s a shopping cartoon of another sort from 2005. After all these years, I still love this joke. Hope you do, too.