In this thread, a couple of posts mention businesses that closed for weird reasons. One mentions a coffee bar where the employees put a sign on the door telling the manager that they’d all quit. Another mentions a KFC where they employees all just stopped showing up for work.
My favorite comes from wolfman.
Please post here any other interesting or unusual stories of businesses closing that you know of. Perhaps the owner was running a gay prostitution ring out of the back. Perhaps a disgruntled employee burned the place down.
Here in Springfield, at least two restaurants have had to close because INS rounded up all of their employees, who were illegal aliens, and in at least one case the owner was put in jail for harboring them.
A family owned and operated diner type restaurant in my town got sued for sexual harassment a few years ago. Caused quite a stir, being a small town nothing really happens in and all.
The situation was a waitress that had been fired for poor work performance, spotty attendance and general suckitude. She apparently didn’t realize waitressing jobs are a dime a dozen, or got all hung up on the imagined principle of the thing, and decided she’d been fired because her supervisor hated her. Why would the supervisor hate her? Because the waitress had taken 3 days off to have a pregnancy terminated and suspected that the supervisor was fiercely anti-abortion.
The fact that the waitress had asked for and got the three days off and then called off the entire following week of the schedule, nah that couldn’t have been the final straw of a flaky job performance.
So she’s going for sexual harassment and wrongful termination, the female supervisor winds up on the stand protesting her own pro-choice beliefs and being asked under oath if she’d ever terminated a pregnancy herself (why the judge allowed this question was beyond anyone’s reckoning) and disclosing that she’d indeed had an abortion fifteen years ago…a real trainwreck.
The owner of the restaurant showed copies of written warnings for bad work performance but the waitress had had a review one month prior to the firing, she was given a fifteen cent raise at the review which her lawyers claimed was proof she had improved her work performance satisfactorily. The owner and supervisor said that was the lowest raise anyone at the restaurant received and that verbal admonition had accompanied the review that the waitress better get her shit together.
The waitress won the wrongful termination, lost the harassment part, and was ordered back pay and job restitution. The owner had been saying all along that he’d rather close than be told who he can hire and fire and closed the restaurant rather than give her back her job. One day open, doing a full business, next day blammo, the other 40-odd employees all out of a job.
The family re-opened under a new name in an adjacent city, which apparently was enough to keep them from having to fulfill the court’s decision, and rehired their former employees. Dunno whatever happened to the waitress, though.
I have a vague memory of hearing about a cafe in a city on the west coast (San Fransisco? LA?) that has been closed for decades, but you can still see the tables all set with glasses and flatware and that one day it just closed. Does that ring a bell for anyone?
I and at least one other Doper worked at a publishing company here in town, which was bought and then shut down by a lending firm that proceeded to flame out in a $50 million fraud lawsuit.
I didn’t know anything about any fraud; I just knew that the day my paycheck bounced was the day I started looking for another job. Fortunately, I found one; the first big round of layoffs came on my last day of work there.
It didn’t shut down, but a bar in Belfast found itself without bouncers when they were arrested for links to dissident paramilitaries. The atmosphere without them improved considerably after that.
There was an article in our local paper about a store owner who had a beef with the city and just closed the store’s doors. She keeps paying all the bills on the store but refuses to open it. There are things from the 60’s that are now worth a fortune in there, but she won’t open it up.
Two places I know of have been closed because there were fronts for drug dealers.
There’s a restaurant down the street from where I work that hasn’t permanently clsoed yet, but has closed for extended periods of time due to some weird stuff in the last 15 years.
First, it closed for several months due to a fire that nearly gutted the whole place.
Years and years later, a kid (who had been a licensed driver for all of a week) drove through the front window causing the restaurant to have to close for a week while it was fixed.
In and of itself, this is not weird. But about a year later another newly licensed driver crashed through the same window causing another shutdown of a week for repair.
The funniest thing about these crashes is that there’s no way to hit the window by driving into them. The only way it can be reached is if these kids were parked in a front spot and put the car in drive instead of reverse.
There was this little Italian restaurant we used to go to that was shut down by the FBI because it was suspected to be a money-laundering operation for organized crime. We went there one day for lunch and found the FBI notice on the door. They’d shut it down about an hour earlier.
I had to shut down a bar because a new law specified it could not be within a mile of a funeral parlor. It was about a quarter mile away. The decision was based on services being held for the departed counted as a place of worship.
In the village where I grew up, both the Post Office and the convenience store were run by the same guy. Who didn’t realise that the Post Office’s money belonged to the government, and the candy store money belonged to him. So he borrowed from Peter to pay Paul, got found out, and bada-bing, we lost both remaining amenities in the village.
Meanwhile, in the town where I went to school, in the early eighties, there was a tiny candy-and-tobacco store in a run-down old building, run by a very, very old lady.
She lived in one half of her store: it had a one-bar electric fire and an easy chair. When you walked through the door she would hobble to her feet and come behind the counter to serve you, which took an age.
The place was musty and smelled of old lady. The stock was mostly out of date. The local teens liked the shop, as she was half-blind and easy to steal from, and couldn’t tell how old anyone was; nor did she ever check ID when selling tobacco. On one occasion a friend Xeroxed a five pound note and palmed that off on her (she was later seen in the street screaming “they ripped me off, this is foreign!”).
She often left the shop to hobble to the grocery store or the Post Office, and when she did this she used to leave a note on the door that said “SORRY, I’M OUT”.
Well, one day the sign was up all day, and the store didn’t re-open the next day, either. And after a few days more, someone had altered the sign to: “SORRY, I’M DEAD”.
A guy who lived up the street from my parents ran his own construction business. He would frequently run the opperation out of his home, which was a violation of the local zoning laws. He later had a shop, which is where the police found him face down in a pile of coke one morning. Why were the police there? They found out the man had ripped off a widow to the tune of about $80,000.
That kinda sucks…there is an ongoing spat here between the city and an adult bookstore over an ordinance prohibiting adult bookstores within 1000 feet of an elementary school. Funny thing is, the store was there for like 15 years before the school, so the city is the one who broke the ordinance. IIRC part of them winning their case is that there are only a handful of tiny pockets of the city that meet that criteria, and they are not zoned for retail.
There was a takeout Thai place near me that was shut down by the Board of Health for having a table and some chairs in it. His license was for takeout only, but they decided the table (which had some magazines on it) and chairs were for dining in and pulled his license.
This isn’t that weird, but…I lived in a VERY small town that had a lovely little patisserie. Fabulous bread, excellent coffee, nice gourmet lunches (with a menu that changed about once a month). One day, the door was locked and there was a very accusatory note on the door from the owner/chef, in which he excoriated everyone in the town for not patronizing him more and blaming us all for putting him out of business. (Hello…if you had changed your menu more than once a month, you’d probably have gotten a lot more repeat customers!)