Last month for my birthday I went out and bought a new (used) mandolin from a local music store - “Fanny’s House of Music.” My wife knew about the purchase, but didn’t really pay attention to where I got it.
Today, she got our credit card bill and had only one charge on it this month, since I don’t use it very often. But she immediately called me at work, wondering if - and why - I had spent $500 at “Fanny’s House.”
Not really a business, but in my home country the main penitentiary facility is near the town of Libertad, so it is called Penal de Libertad, which translates to Freedom Penitentiary.
In Muncie, Indiana there’s a Citizens Exchange Bank. I called to check, but they refused to tell me how many Laotians I could get for 3 Swiss citizens. Maybe the exchange rate changes daily.
When I lived in Indianapolis, I sometimes took I-65 near Market St., where there was a prominent building featuring the giant logo “House Of A Million Screws”.
This used to be the motto of Service Supply Co. (industrial products), which is still in Indianapolis but has dropped the logo. Yet another casualty of political correctness. 
In Avon, CO at the base of Beaver Creek ski resort, there is a Beaver Liquor. They sell a lot of t-shirts in addition to being a liquor store.
In Shanghai, several years ago, I saw a life insurance company called Taikeng Life.
My “home away from home” is House of 1000 Beers.
My standard reply is, “yes there are over one thousand, and no, I haven’t tried them all yet.”
Oh, if those count…
A bar called The Cafeteria; another one called The Street (this one fooled the parents of many of my classmates for months, between the time it opened and the first time those parents happened to walk by it); there was also The Lunchroom (one of the few bars in town which did not serve any food beyond bags of chips) and The Hospital (which was nowhere near the actual hospital).
A different situation, but one of my American coworkers almost fell off my car’s shotgun seat when he saw a bar called Crack. After some momentary confusion I explained the name was a reference to soccer forwards, not to drugs.
Village Farms is the name of a hundred million dollar corporation that operates a bunch of giant greenhouses, mostly in remote west Texas near-desert locations having little connection with anything resembling a village. Their main product is those tomatoes-on-a-vine found in most grocery stores.
The French Laundry is a seriously top-shelf (and mega expensive) restaurant in Yountville CA (Napa Valley).
It took a few pre-google years in New England for me to figure out what the trucks with W.B.Mason emblazoned on the side were all about.
Flags? Masonry? Mustache wax?
I was reminded of this while tootling down the highway with some out of New England friends who were also quite puzzled.
Nobody’s mentioned the Sofa King? There’s one in Hackensack NJ.
Apparently there is a business called Famous Restaurant near my office. It *is *a restaurant, but I’ve been working here nearly ten years and never heard of it before today.
But it does sound like a chain that started as a dairy store. We even had one where I grew up in NYS – my brother got fired from ours for trying to buy beer underage and on the job. :smack:
I buy my work shirts from QVC’s Denim and Co. line. Unfortunately they have this logo
which always reads d&c to my early-morning brain. Ick.
We have a coffee shop called “The Office” in my city.
We have near here a Pied Piper Daycare, which I certainly hope is misleading.
Googling reveals that this is a really popular name for preschools, daycares and other kid oriented businesses across the country. Isn’t the fairy tale well known among Americans?
Nor would I expect anyone to be stoked to be doing business there.
There was a bar near my house here in Tel Aviv called “Dorothy”, with a big picture of Judy Garland on the door. To my surprise, it wasn’t a gay bar. I guess the owners just really liked Wizard of Oz.
I once passed a block of apartments called “Cape View”. It wasn’t just 10 miles away from the nearest water, it was 60 miles from the nearest cape.
Turns out it was on Cape St, so yes, technically it did have a view of the street.
Japanese Zaibatsu make a huge range of random and seemingly unconnected products, though - Mitsubishi, for example, make (or are heavily involved in) cars, trucks, televisions, airconditioners, banking, coal mining and beer brewing, among other things.
