Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis for April 10, 2024

Their hardware store is only now going out of business? Did we just make a time jump forty years into the past?

Now onwards them hardywere stores be called hardlythere stores eh.

If there’s one thing we can count on with Batty, it’s “Lisa’s Story”.

Why, in the space of 30 seconds, does these appearance of thestore change completely?

Well, ye olde Lamp Shoppe is holding on.

Welcome to Meg-a-lo Mart.

Support local businesses any time you can.

First they saved the theater, then someone saved the pizza shop, the newspaper is attempting a re-visioning, and now… who will save the hardware store. Home town re gentrification. All you need is customers.

Probably driven out of business because some a-hole rented all his port-a-potties for the eclipse and then destroyed them by cutting the roof off, with the side effect of them also flooding in the rainstorm meaning fines for all the environmental damage the blue goo and human waste flowing out the flooded doors, wrecking the side business that kept the family establishment afloat.

Oh, dear. Another family business bites the dust.

Famous last words!!!!!!!

I love my local hardware store. It doesn’t carry as much as a Lowes or Home Depot, but I can get service (because nobody knows where the stuff is hidden except the employees) and almost any essential item I need.

Buy the store. Judging by your attitude as a bus driver, it would make an interesting plot.

Good old Ed. There are few people that can get it wrong so often as he can.

Funky will buy it

Hardware stores like neighborhood grocery stores are things of the past……progress?

Hitting a slight nerve…my neighborhood Rite-Aid is closing in 2 weeks

Ah! A Walmart moved to town—Walmart: The Killer of Local Businesses

Unfortunately, neighborhood hardware stores, have a hard time competing against the “Mega Home Improvement stores.” Even if they get a franchise. In order to survive they have to offer something the “giants” can’t. Personalized service is one way.

hey what happen to the eclipse arc i thought it had two weeks to go now we gonna get a week of nuts and bolts

We have an old hardware store. The builders used it while constructing our homes and they still have the odd bits that the big stores don’t. You can replace that one odd bit or do demolition to replace the whole system.

The new places take all the fun out of hardware stores.

So now we’ll have them auctioning off the contents? Then closing? Then many months from now, someone will buy it and reopen it and the townsfolk will donate back everything they bought?

Everyone take a step back. If he panels were reversed and the ’30 seconds earlier" words omitted, then it would be plain that they walked past a Shoppe, with brick walls, and Cranky told Mitch the hardware would always be there for him just as they were walking past the hardware with the closing sign and wood paneled walls. So stop whingeing! I miss the old independent hardware stores and have loved going to hardware stores since I was very young. I used to go with my dad. Ace hardware is the closest thing now, I think.

A sign of the times :-( Vote differently next time.

So what’s Ed complaining about? The store may be going out of business, but right now when he needs it, it’s still there. Maybe he could even take advantage of the sale and stock up on the stuff he can’t buy at Home Despot or Lower’s.

I have mixed feelings about my neighborhood hardware store. I try to support them, but their prices on the stuff I really need from them—the onesie-twosie nuts and bolts and such—have gotten to the point where it’s almost cheaper to buy a box of 100 (or an assortment of twenty different sizes) at the big-box store and throw the leftovers away. Especially true if I’m trying to fix something metric (even though 90+ percent of the merchandise they sell in the store is held together with metric fasteners).

Tomorrow, we will learn that the store is going out of business not because it isn’t making money, but because the building, apparently made out of moldy boards, is on the verge of collapse. Should have been made out of good solid bricks like the “Shoppe” they passed half a minute earlier!

Which is the more annoying comic strip? The single sideways panel that makes you crane your neck to read it? Or the one with the panels printed in reverse order unnecessarily?

On the theory that I oughta say something good about the strip from time to time: Davis really nails the “sloppily lettered sign even more sloppily taped up” thing today!

Sure, why not show the punch line first?

Is this a one-off, or are we going to get a “one minute” earlier, “two minutes earlier”, “one hour earlier” for the rest of the week again?

On Friday, we will learn the main reason the hardware store is closing: they used to make a big part of their annual profit selling seeds and gardening supplies to a cranky old school-bus driver… but then he discovered an online site, and without his purchases the store in town just can’t stay in business.

Hey gotta snark on this “30 seconds earlier” thing. It’s trite and steps all over the joke. Far better to reverse these panels, and stop it please MR B!