The pip
Mountain Warehouse is a real chain. Halfway through making this comic I got nervous and thought I was talking about the business model of their main rival, Trespass. But I think Mountain Warehouse and Trespass would both like you to think that the bargains are going to vanish tomorrow.
BECAUSE THEY ARE!!!!
Or… not.
I wonder how many ways Lottie has found to never pronounce Glenn’s name correctly.
I seem to recall that she actually DID pronounce it correctly once, though I don’t remember when. i think she was distracted and completely forgot to get it wrong.
I count 16, or 17 if you count “Glyn-boy” separate from “Glyn”.
“Glyn”, “Gerg”, “Grem”, “Gorg”, “Glim”, “Glemm”, “Gorf”, “Germ”, “Gorgon”, “Glem”, “Goblin”, “Greg”, “Gelm”, “Glarm”, “Gremlin”, and now “Grerm”.
Some of them are repeated, particularly “Glyn” and “Glemm”. She’s used his name correctly three times, once on the last page of “Green Door” and twice in “Boys Like Fun” — though one of those was in internal monologue.
Claire contributed “Glam”, “Glom”, “Grum”, “Glurb”, and “Goblin” as suggestions for how Lottie would have put him on the list for the D-Slide show in BLF. (It was “Gremlin”.)
A takeout place in BLF also contributed “Glinn”, but I think that’s a separate phenomenon.
is this including whatever she called him in Blood Egg? I know she called him something weird but obviously we can’t go back and check
She used Gurm (with an umlaut) and Glerf in Blood Egg.
I miss Blood Egg
We need to secretly fund an underground publication of that on.. uh. urbit or something
No, because I don’t have enough pages of it left to do a comprehensive survey. I did salvage the “Glerf” page out of browser cache, and I remembered “Gürm”, but I wasn’t sure those were all of them. Anyways, Carlota isn’t exactly the same character as Lottie, nor is Grerm quilte the same character as Gürm.
But hey, maybe they’ll run into Shelley in the woods and she’ll send them off with Daisy and Des to pick up the quest of their distant ancestors. With Claire in place of the Barbarian What Must Not Be Named. (Or Penrose, I guess, but Claire would be funnier.)
Gremlin is, I think, the best of these. Though Gorf is very close for those of us who played video games during the ’80s.
Some galactic defender you are, Space Cadet!
Now I have to wonder what the difference is between “Glemm” and “Glem”. Is the ‘m’ actually pronounced longer? Or did Charlotte just know in her head that she was using a different spelling?
This very day I bought two pairs of trousers online that were on sale TODAY ONLY! 50% OFF*
I am curious to see what price they will be tomorrow.
* “Savings Based On Offering Prices, Not Actual Sales”
Aren’t 50% off trousers simply called shorts?
Depends on which 50%.
They could be chaps! Or legwarmers!
I thought 50% off trousers meant they only had one leg…
Back again to report with some astonishment they’re now back to full price, MORE than double what I paid yesterday. I may need a lie down.
Aaand… it’s one day later, and they’re back down again to the price I paid. “LIMITED-TIME SPECIAL.” Sale ends in three days. My faith in humanity is restored.
Here in Canada we have — or rather had — the Mountain Equipment Coop. Then a board of directors sprang on the membership the news that, hurray! they’d sold it off to a private equity firm, and weren’t we all impressed with their deft stewardship?
Curiously, we were not.
When I rule the world, private equity eels will be first up against the wall. They are nothing but Huns with spreadsheets!
What? That’s awful! I still have my MEC card and I left Toronto in 2008! Them and a strange guy in the Kensington market were my go-to sources for cheap bike miscellany.
Oh man, that’s dreadful. MEC was excellent.
This probably explains why all of the trousers they sell these days are made of a fabric that will cause you to slither off anything you sit upon.
After a close reading of the relevant wiki subsection I still can’t make sense of what happened to MEC. Overexpansion (financed by debt?), backstabbing on the board (and rigged board elections?), heavy losses in the year preceding covid, followed by the sudden unannounced sale of all assets to a US investment firm less than one year into the pandemic (due to the debt problem brought about by the over-expansion?).
All of this seems presaged (in hindsight?
in the wikipedia framing?) by the board governance changes of the early 2010s.
A FULSOME apology. What comprises this?
So over-the-top that he will be unable to tell if she’s really sorry or is taking the piss.
And he’ll have to take the first option or look like a berk.
They keep talking about “pips”, but I don’t see Gladys Knight…
She left on the midnight train to Georgia.
Woo! Woooo!
“IT’S A SIGN!”
Yes. I see it. A big one that says “MOUNTAIN WAREHOUSE” right over the door.
“GOD BE PRAISED!”
🏔🏠 be parsed!
High prices have returned! It’s not an illusion!!
Is “pip” modern slang or something contemporary to John Allison’s universe?
The Collins Dictionary describes “get the pip” as “New Zealand informal”, so presumably Claire picked it up from Glenn himself.
I am a New Zealander, and I have heard the expression, but I didn’t realise it was one of ours! I don’t hear it a lot.
Interesting question, so I looked it up on the Apple dictionary. Here are my findings:
Apple’s dictionary (under pip4) offers, “give someone the pip” as an informal, but most notably, dated phrase meaning, “make someone angry or depressed.” So it apparently is slang, but not modern.
As an aside, the definition of pip4 itself starts, “a disease of poultry or other birds…”, continuing the avian theme we’ve seen heretofore. “In the late 15th century the word came to be applied humorously to unspecified human diseases, and later to ill humor.”
My mother uses Pip as in “He gives me the pip”. Meaning he’s getting on her nerves. She’s 98 and has always used it. We are Welsh so maybe it’s a Welsh thing.
My mother was Glaswegian, roughly the same age as yours, and she used the phrase in the same way.
In the “reverse context” translator they also say “The pip is a numeric value and represents the smallest price change in a currency pair”.
“Pip”? Of “Five Orange” fame? (“Gladys and the Five Orange Pips,” someone thought of that a LONG time ago…). Philip Pirrip? Pip the Troll, “famous…for his carnal prowess”? No, none of the above.
(All these years I for whatever reason remembered the line from Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #14 as “renowned for his carnal prowess” but no, the original text says “famous…for his carnal prowess.” Hm.)
So, if “give the pip” means “make someone angry or depressed,” “does “Toodle Pip” mean “farewell to anger and/or depression” so you should only use “Toodle Pip” when bidding farewell to someone who *makes* you angry and/or depressed? No, probably not.
“Name’s Francis Pumphandle, but everyone calls me “Pip”…”
And that’s all I’ve got on that for now.
“Gets on my wick” is another one.
John Wick? 😉
Consider what ‘Hampton Wick’ is rhyming slang for.
This whole “Pip” thread suddenly makes me feel so ancient!
I lived in England for a couple of years over 30 years, ago, and the expression was known and used occasionally by members of the family I was linked to.
However, it is abundantly used in the P.G Wodehouse “Jeeves and Bertie” books, which I absolutely love.
Pip-pip, cheerio and all that sort of rot!
Since I just read this very thread, I’m not at all sure how I could have missed this had already been pointed out. Ah well!
It’s definitely something that appears in Bertie Wooster-isms in Wodehouse… “X was by this point beginning to give Bertram the infernal pip” etc etc
Lottie won’t need a sleeping bag. She’s already wearing one.
So in the States we’ve got REI as our main supplier of camping gear, outdoor adventuring, wannabe post-apocalyptic survival preppers, etc. I’m not sure who their main rival would be considered to be.
I think it would be Cabela’s. Near me they have an emporium which includes a central feature of mounted deer, birds, and predators in a life-size, zoo-like diorama, in addition to all the retail.
Do you live in central Nebraska? The Cabela’s I visited there was like that.
Dicks or Big 5 I’d say. They don’t engender the same love but I always check those shops out before I head to REI.
Academy Sports and Outdoors. And is Bass Pro Shop still a thing?
I haven’t been into the camping thing since my kid aged out of Scouts, but the place we would always go first was a local shop in the Dallas-Fort Worth area called Mountain Sports.
Bass Pro is huge still. They have a pyramid.
Eastern Mountain Sports? Per Wikipedia they have only 24 locations now but I have the impression they used to be much larger. They had a store locally which now is gone. I used to think of them as the other REI.
The History section of the EMS wiki page gets quite dire in recent years
Good GOD. “Acquired by GoDigital Media Group as part of its strategy to generate synergy between content, community and commerce” is just a few steps away from “bought by a 4chan board for the lulz.”
Bass Pro/Great Outdoors Group actually own Cabela’s now since 2017.
Geoff Downe’s Downy Jeff Sleeping Bags – Yes! You can sleep warm and dry! No Drama!
The mere prospect buggles the mind, yes?
If she really tries to haggle, Lottie might end up on the store’s unwanted list. Glenn, who seems like a camping expert, would be even more annoyed with her. Claire is adorable in her attempts to make them reconcile. But it seems difficult.
Covent Garden has a Mountain Warehouse next to a Cotswold and across the block from a North Face.
You know, in case you wanted to climb three mountains at once.
I red the first line of dialogue and immediately thought “there’s ALWAYS a sale at mountain warehouse!” it’s a lot like Sports Direct in that regard
My experience with stores that use the “perpetual sale” model is that the fictional “normal” price they display is usually at least four times the price you’d pay if you bought it somewhere sensible. So “%50 off” really means you’re only paying double instead of quadruple.
Not sure about lately but there was a time you could rely on a “65% off your entire order” sale at Land’s End around Black Friday, which sets a lower bound on how much overpriced they are the rest of the year.
Quagmire resilience is what you need at Glasto some years. Trench Foot is always a threat. My daughter recommends bin bags tied above the knee.
I used to wear the bin bags between my socks and boots. they dont give uch purchase as footwear and you war through them quite quickly.
Perhaps ishould have been wearing thicker, treaded bin bags?
It’s all false advertising anyway. I’ve been to loads of Mountain Warehouses, not once have they had a single mountain in stock.
Mountains are only available through the “secret menu”. You have to know to ask.
I think the real question is how they fit the mountains into a warehouse that size.
They’re highly compressed and then vacuum-packed, like those foam mattresses you can buy online.
Perhaps the mountain IS the warehouse.
That sounds deep. Although, wouldn’t it be “Warehouse Mountain” then?
This does of course imply a precursor Molehill Warehouse.
Oh Rob what a bon mot that was
It may be the bonnest of all my mots.
Now you’re making warehouses out of storage lockers.
Men’s Wearhouses™ out of Foot Lockers™
I swear, I am pretty sure I’ve heard people saying this about Mountain Warehouse in real life. Perhaps I know a Glenn.