Original Air Date: January 15, 2008
The second-season premiere of 10 Items or Less opens with LESLIE and CARL working on a Money Daze booth near the front of the store as retail rival AMY enters and declares that her panties are in a bunch. Apparently, there’s a big sign in her store SuperValueMart’s parking lot diverting customers to a free money giveaway at Greens & Grains, and she wants to know why.
Leslie explains that all of his top front teeth are fake, so when he was eating celery and peanut butter recently, one popped out. When he went to retrieve it from behind the piece of furniture where it fell, he found a stockpile of $5,000 in silver dollars that his father had horded. Now, Leslie’s going to give all the money away in a store promotion.
Leslie then offers Amy the opportunity to be the first to try out the new Money Daze machine by going inside for a minute and catching as much money as she can while an air mechanism blows the money around. Unfortunately, the heavy silver dollars don’t budge, so Amy starts scooping them up off the floor with her hands and shoes. When her minute finally winds down, however, Leslie can’t get the door to open, which causes Amy to drop all of the money in a panic. The door does eventually work again, and BUCK takes Amy away to calm down as Leslie tells Carl to lock the money in his office until he can go to the bank to exchange it for dollar bills that will fly.
Soon afterwards, Carl and Buck stumble upon YOLANDA making out with Jim (Guest Star Ryan Gaul), the produce guy from SuperValueMart, whom she met at the farmers’ market. Carl and Yolanda had agreed to see other people, and she’s really into Jim since they have a lot to talk about, both of them being in produce. Plus, he’s a vegetarian. When Yolanda tries to leave the store later that day to meet up with Jim, Carl immediately tells Leslie that she’s sleeping with the enemy. Leslie objects to the relationship because he doesn’t want Yolanda revealing his store’s produce secrets to a competitor.
Suddenly, two guys with stocking caps on their heads enter the store with guns. One grabs Yolanda around the neck in a headlock while Leslie assures them that if they come back tomorrow during Dollar Days, they can get money without guns. The robber holding Yolanda shoots his gun toward the ceiling anyway to let everyone know he’s not kidding about them hitting the floor.
After one gunman learns there’s nothing but a coupon for 40 cents off of popsicles in the first register, he gets more agitated and demands money so he and his partner can leave. Leslie convinces him to let the customers go in the meantime by promising to shut up. As the released hostages exit under a threat that the robbers will kill the Greens & Grains staff if anyone calls the cops, Leslie tries to persuade the ones taking grocery with them to at least pay first at the express checkout register. (Yeah, right.)
The other robber walks over to tell his partner that the money booth won’t open, although it looked fine when he was there the day before. Carl eventually does get it to open, and one robber goes in to retrieve all of the dollar bills. While he’s inside, Leslie leans against the door and unintentionally shuts it as he and Carl debate why wearing stocking caps protects the victims rather than the criminals.
Carl thinks he recognizes the robber’s voice, but Leslie warns him that he doesn’t want to know who it is because then the robbers would have to kill them all to prevent getting fingered by them and the other hostages. After the door locks close, the robber reacts just like Amy did earlier, and he pulls off his stocking cap in a frenzied panic. Lo and behold—he’s Jim, Yolanda’s new man friend. Leslie panics then because one of the robbers has seen his face, which means he’ll have to kill them now, regardless of the fact that Jim is locked away inside the money booth.
The next scene involves Leslie getting interviewed live by a reporter as Jim, with his stocking cap back on, points a gun at his chest. A huge crowd of people, cops, and recent customer hostages also stand nearby outside watching. Leslie says that while he won’t identify one of the robbers specifically, he will reveal that the man works at SuperValueMart. Amy, who’s in the crowd of onlookers, comes over in an indignant huff, accusing Leslie of trying to smear her store to promote his giveaway.
Refusing to believe the robbers work at her store, Amy pulls the stocking cap off of the robber’s head and immediately recognizes him. She then goes predictably ballistic, ranting about how Jim used to be a member of her SuperValueMart family, but now he’s dead to her, which prompts the police to carry her away. Meanwhile, Jim confesses to the crowd that he’s robbing the store to get money for his sick mother because his insurance company refused to pay for her treatment for heart problems. Leslie responds by telling Jim that he can have the $5,000 in silver dollars.
Back inside Greens & Grains, TODD identifies the other stocking-capped robber as SuperValueMart butcher Zack Hangler (Guest Star Hamilton von Watts) when he recognizes a tattoo on his arm. He can’t believe that Zack has broken the butcher brotherhood by robbing a fellow butcher. At the same time, Yolanda is pissed that Jim pretended to like her in order to “case the place,” but Jim denies that was what happened. When he sees the two small bags containing the silver dollars in Leslie’s office, he gets angry because he needs much more than that to pay for his mom’s heart transplant.
Leslie suggests he go to the library to learn how to do it himself, and when Jim replies that he can’t take his mom’s heart out of her, Leslie states he already has by robbing the store. Realizing that Leslie’s assessment is right on the money, Jim begins panicking again because he knows his mom is going to be furious. While he’s distracted, Yolanda knocks Jim down, enabling Buck to grab the gun when he drops it. Yolanda and Leslie begin dancing and chanting, “We got the gun!”
Determined to save the rest of his crew, Leslie then hulks up—he literally impersonates the Hulk busting out of Bruce Banner—and crawls into the vent that held the money to head downstairs, where INGRID, suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, is actually helping Zack. The robber calls her “babe” and lets her walk around freely while she helps keep RICHARD, Todd, and Carl in line. Above in the ceiling vent passages, Leslie, Yolanda, and Buck plot how to free the others. But, when the ceiling gives away and they fall into the room, Ingrid grabs their dropped gun to help Zack hold them hostage, too. She’s acting so strangely, though, even Zack gets nervous with her waving a firearm around.
Thankfully, Amy shows up at the door about then, and she starts screaming at Zack in a righteous rage when she sees him. The two just broke up, and Amy yells at him to go ahead and shoot everybody. While Zack’s turned away from the hostages to argue with Amy, Leslie makes a play for the gun. He only manages to grab Zack’s arm, causing the robber to unintentionally fire a bullet that (1) hits a can of corn, (2) ricochets off a glass jar of pickles and (3) a revolving sign before (4) knocking down the Dollar Days sign on the wall that (5) hits Ingrid in the head and (6) makes her reflexively fire a bullet directly into Leslie’s butt. After the path of destruction comes to an end, Buck quickly grabs both guns to save the day for a second time.
At work some unspecified time later, Leslie thanks everyone for showing up after the traumatic experience they endured. Despite the inflatable round thing the staff gives him to help him sit more comfortably, Leslie’s still a bit upset that Ingrid shot him in the butt at point blank range. The bullet went in one buttock and out the other, which Leslie describes as giving him the enviable ability to tie them both up like a tennis shoe if he wants. He still loves Ingrid since she’s a part of the family, but the trust is gone, even if he’s willing to turn “the other cheek.”
MY TAKE: “Dollar Day Afternoon” is a strong start to the second season of 10 Items or Less and yet another reason to wonder why shows like it don’t get picked up/offered by broadcast networks. So, “Yay!” for cable TV.
Photo: TBS
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