Wattley's Recession

Dylan Wattley, a cashier at an Atlanta area Target store, was returning to his register after what sources confirm was a break that lasted “at least 8 minutes longer” than his allotted break time. What he found was a store in absolute chaos. 

Customers screamed at staff about prices. People were shoving their way to the doors with armfuls of toilet paper with no intention of paying for it. Outside, the flashing lights of police cars. Dylan was momentarily stupefied by the anarchy.“Good work, Dylan,” yelled Shanise from register 6, “You crashed the whole damn economy!”

How, you may ask, can a single cashier break the entire United States economy? Well, for that answer we spoke with Professor Jackson Donnell, of the Tallulah Falls Community College economics department.

“The economy is like a row of dominoes,” Professor Donnell explains, “and it only takes the first to fall to bring the rest to the ground.”

Professor Donell goes on to explain how the current economic state can be traced back to Dylan Wattley.He explains the timeline thusly:

• Dylan Wattley takes a 23-minute break that pushes into the time designated for Jennifer’s break.

• Jennifer goes on break, leaving Shanise on the only open register for 8 full minutes.

• Lines back up and bottleneck the flow of customers, slowing the store’s revenue stream. Additionally, some customers are so frustrated by the wait they abandon their purchase altogether.

• The slowing and loss of sales causes the store to raise prices and cut payroll to maintain its profit level.

• With higher prices and less income, consumers buy less and steal more.

• This causes profits to fall farther and cycle back to price increases and payroll cuts, ad infinitum.

• The United States economy collapses completely in the ensuing recession.

“As you see,” says Professor Donnell, “Dylan could not have picked a worse time to take an extra long break.”

We also spoke with Andy Putzder, author of Everything’s Coming Up Capitalist! and CEO of, among many other restaurant chains, Juicy Miguel’s Burrito Mansion and Sandwichigan: Michigan’s Favorite Sandwich Shop, for his expertise and insight.

“The economy is a load we all must carry,” says Putzder, “and when these so-called ‘workers’ wanted more money we gave it to them,” [Editor’s note: No they didn’t], “pushing the brunt of that weight onto the corporations they work for. And how did they repay us? By doing less work! And what do you think happens when one group stops carrying their share of the weight? Of course the whole thing would come crashing down! What did they expect would happen?”[Editor’s note: What a douche]

When we asked Putzder how he justified his analogy when corporations reported record profits last year during a period of historically high inflation and historically stagnant wages, he abruptly ended the interview, stating “Why don’t all you socialists just go back to Denmark?!”

At a recent press conference, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell spoke on what is now referred to as “Wattley’s Recession”.

“This just shows,” said Powell, “how precariously we’ve teetered on a razor’s edge that all it took was one Target employee, Dylan Wattley, taking a 23-minute break to topple the entire system

“Yes,” Powell adds, “that is definitely what happened. It’s Dylan Wattley’s fault and nobody else’s.

”Powell also specified that he’d be raising the federal interest rate six times by the end of the fiscal year, stating “This is how you get out of situations like this Dylan Wattley pickle. Just don’t look into how it works, just trust me that it will. After a fashion.”

Effects of Wattley’s Recession can now be felt all over the country. One seafood restaurant in Cape Cod posted a sign on the door that said “RESTAURANT CLOSED. SORRY, DYLAN DOESN’T WANT TO WORK ANYMORE”. Public parks and underpasses are packed with people living out of tents or shanties, colloquially referred to as “Wattleyvilles”. Gas pumps all over have been adorned with stickers of Dylan’s likeness that say “DYLAN DID THAT!”.

But nobody, perhaps, has felt the effects more than Dylan Wattley himself.

“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” says Wattley weeks after his actions tanked the stock market and plunged the country into recession. “I just kind of got lost scrolling through Reddit and lost track of time.”

Wattley says he hasn’t been able to go out for fear of being ostracized or publicly scorned.

“People yell shit at me all the time about how I ruined their lives,” he says. “The worst was this one time I tried to eat at a restaurant and the manager came out with my plate and was like ‘Hey, you ordered this to go?’ and threw the whole thing out into the parking lot.

“Then my girlfriend got evicted,” he continues, “because the landlord raised her rent and, since her hours got cut at work, she had to find a cheaper place. When I asked her where she said ‘Don’t worry about it’. Haven’t heard from her since.”

Things were getting bad for Wattley at Target as well.

“They just kept making me clean the changing rooms,” he says, “and any time I’d sit down or look at my phone someone would be like ‘You can’t quiet quit, my rent’s high enough as it is!’. Also someone brought in an air horn and blew it whenever my break was over.P eople kept asking like ‘Why don’t you want to work anymore, Dylan!?’. And then I got fired, so yeah, shit sucks.”

So what’s next for Dylan Wattley, national pariah?

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m at my mom’s for now, but she thinks her social security’s going to dry up soon, so there’s that. I heard Adam McKay is working on a movie about how I destroyed the economy and everything, but I don't think I’m going to see any revenue from that. Also Elon Musk DM’d me on Twitter and said ‘welcome to the club’ and I really don’t want to find out what that’s about.”

Well, whatever happens to Dylan Wattley, all I can say for sure, as I work my two jobs while barely affording rent, is that he certainly can go fuck himself!