"Rewarding financially, I mean, obviously"

Shoe, 10/19/23

I've complained about this before, but Shoe has a long-established setting where the various bird characters get drunk and hit on one another, and it's the fern bar, so seeing them drinking and smoking and flirting at Roz's Diner in the middle of the day seems off to me. Since the primary audience for this strip, like all newspaper comic strips, is vaguely disgruntled baby boomers, it's possible that this is supposed to be a commentary on the fact that everyone is "working" form home now and you can't even enjoy a nice plate of meatloaf for lunch at your local greasy spoon without having to watch a bunch of kids who make "apps" for a living get drunk and try to have sex with each other, which is probably why they're charging so much for the meatloaf these days. It's also possible that the Shoe brain trust simply lost the image files for the fern bar background and they don't feel like drawing it again.

Mary Worth, 10/19/23