To share the profits. This metaphor has largely replaced the early-twentieth-century slice of the melon, but exists side by side with the more literal piece of the action. It comes from nineteenth-century America. T. N. Page used a version in Red Rock (1898): “Does he want to keep all the pie for himself?” And the Boston Sunday Herald (1967): “An appellate court victory . . . cut Weymouth’s total property valuation . . . to give the town a bigger slice of the sales tax pie.” A related term, no matter how you slice it, is a twentieth-century Americanism meaning “no matter how you look at it.” Carl Sandburg used it in The People, Yes (1936): “No matter how thick or how thin you slice it it’s still baloney.”