I recently encountered “Hobby Lobby,” which is apparently a chain all over the midwest of craft stores. I just can’t get past the name - it sounds like the name of a fake store that you’d hear in a sitcom, like if Darlene needed to get a summer job on Roseanne and Dan comes in and he’s all like, “I heard Hobby Lobby’s hiring” and Darlene’s all “Hobby Lobby? God, why don’t I just suck on a nail gun?”
Another recent “fake name” favorite is the chain restaurant Houlihan’s. I actually thought that was the name of the “flair” restaurant in Office Space for a moment, because it just sounds like a totally fake name that perfectly embodies the vibe of every awful Applebee’s/Ruby Tuesday/Bennigan’s type place across America. Whenever I see a Houlihan’s, I wonder for a moment whether I’ve wandered onto the set of the latest Kevin Smith movie.
I’m always suspicious of places with generic names that don’t really mean anything, like “Applied Services Ltd”. It makes me wonder what they’re hiding.
Anything overly long, similar to a number of businesses named on the Simpson’s (wasn’t there something like “Professor PJ Cornucopia’s Fantastic Foodmagorium And Great American Steakery” mentioned on that show?) just seems to me to be fake somehow, even if the business is legitimate. For example, there really is a business named “Two Small Men With Big Hearts Moving Company,” but it just doesn’t sound legitimate.
The exception to this rule are firms named after people, where the partners pile themselves up in the name: Smith, Jones, Brown, Collins, Turner, Field, Ross, McLean, and Dunn. Now that’s either a law firm or an accounting company!
What about those law-firm-type names where one of the names just doesn’t “go” with the others, like Winthrop, Smythe, Belvedere, and Yablonsky? Those always sound like joke names to me!
I’ve heard of a Thai restaurant in Belfast called Thai-tanic which sounds fake to me but ya never know. There’s a pizza place in my town called Rebel Pizza that has a huge picture of Che Guevara as its logo. It seems like a sit-com pizzaria.
Any retail clothing chain that begins with the initial J., except for J. Press, the original. There’s also J. Crew, J. Jill, J. Riggings…What were they thinking? Were they thinking?
When I first heard of “Pottery Barn” on Friends, I assumed they’d made that name up, becauswe it was just too beige, vapid and meaningless to be true. It was obviously a joke, making fun of stores that sell that sort of crap. I was shocked to discover it actually existed.
We have a Thai restaurant called “Funky Thai.” I’ll believe ANY name for a Thai restaurant or a hair salon, because they seem to try to attract attention with silly puns.
The best business name I’ve ever seen was a sports store in Oakville that specialized in racquet sports equipment: “The Merchant of Tennis.”
You see them all over the place. It’s not just two guys and a truck, it’s a company called that. Surely they could have come up with something better, eh?
That’s like the current trend of radio stations called Bob FM or Dave FM or Hank FM, or somesuch fake name. It’s a format licensed from the broadcasting conglomerate who created it.
The other day I looked out of the window of the bus and saw a delivery truck for Flagstone Business Interiors. It doesn’t sound that weird, but look at their logo:
It really made me laugh, like they were the worst undercover cops in the world or something! It seems to me that the same joke was even used on the Simpsons, but I can’t remember what it stood for there.
The town I grew up in had an Acme Market right downtown, and there was another at the closest shopping mall – both part of the same chain (of supermarkets). So when the Coyote started getting things from Acme*, it didn’t bother me – it just seemed weird that our Acme never stocked rocket-powerede roller skates and giant magnets.
*Chuck Jones’ coyote was just carrying on a long-lived tradition of Warner Brothers characters ordering stuff from Acme. Have a look:
Speaking of law firms, I thought someone was playing a joke on me the first time I was told to reach the website of the esteemed Morrison & Foerster firm by navigating to Mofo.com. At least someone there, presumably in the IT department, has a great sense of humor.
