The attraction between the three girls, especially Queenie, and Sammy exhibits Sammy's typical teenage hormones and makes his character more realistic. The rising action perpetuates as the girls continue to move about the store drawing attention from both Sammy and other workers and building curiosity in the reader as to what will happen to them.
The reader is clued in that the crisis is about to take place when Sammy says, "Then everybody's luck begins to run out," (Updike 15) in paragraph twelve. The crisis actually occurs in the last sentence of that paragraph when Lengel, the manager, confronts the girls and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach" (15). This is the major crisis that the story has been leading up to, although it's not necessarily the first crisis to take place. The first crisis that took place happened when Sammy "stood there with a box of Hiho crackers trying to remember if [he] rang it up or not," (12) so he rang it up again and got caught by the "cash-register-watcher." Updike uses that small crisis as foreshadowing to show that the girls were eventually going to be a larger problem for Sammy. Critics also regard the major crisis as being the moment when "the girls arrive at Sammy's checkout slot, ready to buy a jar of herring snacks, when Lengel, the store manager arrives" and "a small scene ensues [when] Lengel informs the girls, 'After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy'" (Schiff 144). As Lengel continues to embarrass the girls Sammy feels more and more sorry for them, almost as though he can sympathize with their embarrassment. Sammy admits earlier in the story that he "began to feel sorry for [the girls]" (Updike 14) when he witnesses the butcher treating them like the meat he sells. This provides foreshadowing as to how Sammy will deal with the situation and leads directly to the climax.
The story reaches its climax in the second paragraph on page 16.
