Gasoline Alley by Jim Scancarelli for October 03, 2010

Okay, what am I missing here? When Jim draws a real life figure, it has some significant meaning. Who’s the blond in the middle right panel?

She is probably a worker who happen to be in the forefront….with no significance.

Pull it out and buy gold Slim. Next month you pay them to store it for you. That passbook is a collectible - right up there with Telegrams and the toaster you got opening the account.

Gold at $1280 an ounce? Yeah, right. And the people who sell it to you will be glad to buy it back for $700.

I haven’t seen a passbook since the bank I work for acquired a failed institution some 20 years ago…and even then the passbooks were optional.

Slim needs to have Clovia show him how online banking works.

I won’t bank where the signs are in Spanish.

Dormancy fees, excess activity fees… I was charged a fee for loitering when the teller line stopped moving.

I wonder the blonde woman being shown a customer. One bank we went to decades ago started charging for taking our money out of savings accounts. My parents at that time left there and went to a different bank.

Is it just me, or does it look like Slim’s right hand is broken at the wrist in the past panel?

Is it just me, or does it look like Slim’s right hand is broken at the wrist in the past panel?

I recently received a junk mailing from some bank advertising their “high-yield” interest rate: 1.35%!! When I opened the account around 1964, 4% was pretty typical. Of course, that was when $10K a year was a decent middle-class salary and $2K bought a nice new car.

Passbook? Is Scancarelli recycling strips from 1973? And when Slim is the literary scholar in town, what does that say?

The blonde, obviously a real life friend of Scancarelli. He often draws in family and friends into the strip.

I once had a bank charge a “service fee” for NOT having any money in the account. The account was a “Christmas fund.” So, of course, when I took the money out to buy Christmas presents with it, the “savings” account had no more money in it. So, the next month, I noticed that my bank statement included a $5 “fee” for “servicing” an account with no money in it! The whole incident made me so angry that I marched down to the bank, withdrew ALL of the money which I had in OTHER account (checking, savings, etc.) and I went to another bank and re-deposited the money.

I figured that a “savings” account which could end up in DEFICIT numbers was the sort of “truth in advertising” scam which someone from the Federal government SHOULD have been investigating.

Then the bankers all shed crocodile tears when they realized that the general public was not all that enthusiastic about the government using tax money to bail the banks out of their most recent fiascos!

Hmmm, I think I will just pass… sorry guys

Passbook? I haven’t seen a passbook in over thirty years.

It’s a sad commentary on the education of the younger generation that Slim knows more than they do!

A good banker could figure the interest in her head. Move to the next window, Slim. There is an adult there.

This reminds me of a couple of weeks ago when I had to explain to someone who Laurel and Hardy were…

Who told Slim about Charles Dickens?