History Main / PennyPinchingCrab

In popular culture, crabs are often associated with greed and materialism. Anthropomorphized crab characters will often be depicted as selfish and ill-tempered towards anyone who tries to take their valuables. Part of this may come from a few old idioms and other terms that relating to crabs. A "penny pincher" is someone who is incredibly frugal with money, and the use of "pincher" tends to be likened to a crab, making for a useful visual pun. The term "crabby" means irritable, which often goes hand-in-hand (or claw-in-claw) with the more greedy crab characters. There's also the fact that some kinds of crabs, with their ragged-looking faces, just ''look'' like stereotypical greedy old men. And another association is simply that crabs (and lobster) are often viewed as expensive luxury food (particularly before it became easy and cheap to ship frozen foods) and consequently are associated with money.

* Mr. Krabs from ''WesternAnimation/SpongebobSquarePants'' is the TropeCodifier. He is an anthropomorphic crab, and the wealthy owner of the fast food restaurant the Krusty Krab. Krabs is shown to have a MoneyFetish, caring about money more than anything else and often doing whatever it takes to get more of it. In the episode "[[Recap/SpongeBobSquarePantsS3E14Ugh Ugh]]", he appears as a small prehistoric crab that does nothing but repeat the word "money" over and over as it scurries around. Stephen Hillenburg suggested that this characterization is based somewhat in reality: crabs in real life are opportunistic detritivores, meaning that they subsist mainly on decaying food and aren't picky about where it comes from.
** One episode had him attending a ''convention'' of penny-pinching crabs.

-->--''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants''

[[caption-width-right:270:[[WesternAnimation/TheSpongebobSquarepantsMovie "Hello! I like money!"]]]]

-->"What inspired you to write an entire trope page about greedy crustaceans?"\\
"Money!"[[note]]Most of us tropers don't actually get paid to edit this wiki. We're pretty much DoingItForTheArt. This is simply meant as a followup to the quote from ''WesternAnimation/TheSpongebobSquarepantsMovie'' in the image caption.[[/note]]

* Mr. Krabs from ''WesternAnimation/SpongebobSquarePants'' is the TropeCodifier. He is an anthropomorphic crab, and the wealthy owner of the fast food restaurant the Krusty Krab. Krabs is shown to have a MoneyFetish, caring about money more than anything else and often doing whatever it takes to get more of it. In the episode "[[Recap/SpongeBobSquarePantsS3E14Ugh Ugh]]", he appears as a small prehistoric crab that does nothing but repeat the word "money" over and over as it scurries around.

->'''Incidental 60:''' Hey! It's my lucky day! A penny!\\

* Bubbly Crab of ''VideoGame/MegaManX2'' is one of the bosses; he only worked for the villains because they paid him enough.

In popular culture, crabs are often associated with greed and materialism. Anthropomorphized crab characters will often be depicted as selfish and ill-tempered towards anyone who tries to take their valuables. Part of this may come from a few old idioms and other terms that relating to crabs. A "penny pincher" is someone who is incredibly frugal with money, and the use of "pincher" tends to be likened to a crab, making for a useful visual pun. The term "crabby" means irritable, which often goes hand-in-hand (or claw-in-claw) with the more greedy crab characters. There's also the fact that some kinds of crabs, with their ragged-looking faces, just ''look'' like stereotypical greedy old men.

See ThievingMagpie for more greedy animals, and GiantEnemyCrab for more crabs. Related to ScavengersAreScum. A surprisingly common sub-trope is the portrayal of crabs not merely greedy, but as having pirate motifs, crossing over with SemiaquaticSpeciesSailor.

See ThievingMagpie for more greedy animals, and GiantEnemyCrab for more crabs. Related to ScavengersAreScum.