And here, anything vaguely close to or associated with the town of Princeton/Princeton U works it into their company name.
In the 1980s a friend’s mom owned a salon called “Curl up and Dye.” Cutesy in one way; ominous and threatening in another.
A few years ago we saw a sign near Times Square that proclaimed:
Hair
Sandwiches
Upon closer inspection we determined that there was a hair salon housed above a deli and the signs were, unfortunately, very close to one another. I lost the pic in the Great BlackBerry death of '16 (last week).
I know someone who lived in a place called “Highland Pointe.” There was nothing Scottish or French about it, and it wasn’t located on top of a hill or anything. There was no justification whatsoever for the name.
There’s a preschool around here called La Petite Academy. It drives me nuts that they couldn’t commit and spell it “Académie.”
When I was pregnant, someone asked me if I was going to register at Buy Buy Baby, which I thought was a funny/wry nickname for Babies-R-Us, similar to how people call Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck.” Because obviously it’s mocking how people spend stupid money on junk babies don’t need.
IT IS A REAL STORE. I feel like shopping there is like admitting you are throwing your money away on dumb crap.
They were thinking about the ram that showed up in the bush at the last minute so that Abraham didn’t have to sacrifice Isaac. Kind of an odd name for a bookstore, I agree.
Ah, there is a light industry park near my house that houses a company called Flexovit. That’s all it says on the signs. Not even a tag line, such as Flexovit: Dental Solutions or anything that might give you a clue.
After driving by it and being annoyed a million times, I googled it and learned they make industrial abrasives. I guess, well, it’s not like you’re going to stop somewhere and impulse purchase some industrial grade abrasives because you saw the sign, so the name/sign isn’t intended to advertise in any way. However it still sounds to me like some monolithic corporation in a futuristic dystopian novel, maybe everyone is employed by Flexovit but even the workers don’t know what Flexovit produces.
On the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland, there used to be a sign on the side of a big building that said “STOP CASTING POROSITY”. That was it. No company name. I kept wondering what was wrong about casting porosity and why it had to be stopped.
Semi-anecdote here, also view from different angle.
In 2001 I established private business. IT. I named it “mysurname . com” Hey it was not taken by that time. And I found it as funny trolling, since some future historian would gone baffled, what .com company survived y2000.
OTOH. I could never make success with that name in Murrica, since my surname is in the ranking of Fu King, Da Phuc or Mi Dik Long variants. In my specific case, I’d guess you’d think I import and pimp up cars.
Not quite the same, but there’s a large cemetery near me that has a row of shops across the road - one of the shops (now gone) used to be a greengrocer - the shop was called ‘The Melon Cauli’
Personally, hairdresser shop names are typically the ones that are most likely to annoy me (and not just because I’m bald). from bad puns like ‘Curl Up And Dye’ to bad idioms like ‘A Cut Above The Rest’. Ugh.
I’ve always felt the same way about modern-speak rail crossing signs that read STOP RR XING. I haven’t seen any out here, but in the west it seems to be a preferred form for both road and back-of-school-bus signs.
I dunno what RR XINGing is, but it must be awful and I agree it should be stopped.
There’s a “car audio” shop on the east outskirts of town called “That Soundz Guud”.
The combination of their product being the stereo systems the lowest common denominator loves and the name itself (including the spelling) has, does, and will always remind me of the demise of black culture.
Sure does, since the abomination that is “guud”/“gud” is in the large-and-growing category of “internet-age ghetto slang”, along with “bae”, “turnt”, “fucc”/“bacc” and other such “words” that strip my gears and make me feel dumber hearing used.
OP back again. I would imagine, as someone said, that “Thrift On By” is a play on “Drift On By,” only
a) I am not familiar with “drift on by” as a common expression, certainly not common enough to make the connection obvious; and
b) it seems like about the worst connection you could make if you want to keep a business running, since presumably you would like to have your customers stop rather than drifting (or thrifting) on by at 40 mph.
Well, I expect they had something in mind.
Lots of other good/bad business names in these other posts. Maybe in comparison to some of them “Thrift On By” isn’t quite as awful as I think. Dac Phuc, Mourning Glory, and Just Jeeps and More, along with a few others, are all pretty darn winceable. As for Fifth Third Bank, I’ll only say that they seem pretty successful despite the name, and that the mathematician in me always refers to them as Fifteenth.
