As you know, I keep an eye out for funny URLs featured in comic strips and find out if they really exist (and if they don’t, I quickly register the domain name and redirect it to here… bwahahahaha!). Well, the newspaper comic about working in a department store with the obvious title Retail (current content available via the Seattle PI; also NOT to be confused with the long-defunct webcomic Retail) had one of its characters start a blog (coopersretailblog.com) and yes, it is a real blog, written in the obnoxious voice of Cooper:

When I’m not lifting boxes, getting yelled at by my boss or being defecated on by the general public, I like to unwind with a game of Resident Evil or catch up on some classic literature like X-Men or Lone Wolf & Cub.

Cooper’s off-work interests and his attitude remind me of somebody else on the web. Hmm.

Anyway, this isn’t the first webpresence of the Retail comic (which is good because its distributor, King Features, really doesn’t like the web). At this site, you can leave messages with your own Retail horror stories and… well, that’s all you can do. (Easter egg: if you dial the number on the comic’s logo barcode, you get a voice mail service where you can also tell your stories)

It’s not much of stretch to say that “Retail” is hoping to become the “Dilbert” of direct customer contact. Here’s what King Features’ blurb about the strip says:

In an industry that employs more than 23 million people, (approximately one in five Americans), and handles consumer spending worth $4.1 trillion, the retail sector provides a rich source of humor stemming from the unique interactions between employees and shoppers. Retail, the first-ever comic strip to focus solely on this sector, presents a hilarious look at the retail industry by chronicling the daily events at the fictitious Grumbel’s department store. Created by Massachusetts retail management veteran Norm Feuti, the humor of Retail will play-out through the day-to-day trials and triumphs of four main Grumbel’s department store employees and the customers they encounter.

Uh, excuse me, but… 23 million people is one in five Americans? Did I miss some cataclysmic event that lowered the U.S. population from 300 million to 115 million? Or do they mean “employed” Americans? Even that seems pretty low. All I know is there are 277 million Americans NOT employed in retail, and that’s 277 million whose role in this dramedy is “customer”. And that’s where the Dilbert parallel falls apart. Millions of employed Americans have a “pointy-haired boss”… much fewer ARE “pointy-haired bosses”. But a lot more Americans are the Customers who are the antagonists in “Retail” than the Retail Workers who are the protagonists. Still, with “hit” TV shows being seen by 15 million of the aforementioned 300 million, that 23 million is a good sized audience to target. And, based on the comments so far on Cooper’s Retail Blog, that audience is responding positively to Cooper’s self-proclaimed “hate”. But you gotta wonder when Cooper is getting linked from the “Customers Suck” webforum by “Mr. Rude”.
Asides: Looking back as far as I could on Daily Ink’s “Retail” archive (one year), I found an earlier reference to a “blog”:

And compare this “Retail” from January 2006 to the last “Retail Weekly”
Webcomic from 2004:


I’m NOT accusing anybody of stealing ideas, it’s just that, in retail (as well as in “Retail”) there are some that are way too obvious…

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 2:38 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.