The Wasp — 1895 — page 1058: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This cartoon depicts a hotel clerk (left) and a manager or proprietor (right, wearing top hat) at a service counter. The manager holds papers while a suitcase sits on the floor. The caption presents a dialogue about operating a cheap hotel in "Frisco" (San Francisco). The manager states they must keep boarders' costs extremely low—otherwise their Boston and Chicago boarders would "starve to death." The satire critiques the economic desperation of budget hotel operations during this era. It suggests that competition for poor lodgers was so fierce that proprietors operated at near-impossible margins, violating normal business principles ("financial law") simply to survive. The cartoon mocks both the absurd economics and the implicit threat that desperate guests might literally perish without such cheap accommodations.