Bumping this thread in part because I looked for it to post it in yet another thread.
The Mexican restaurant had their business license revoked earlier this year for failure to pay taxes, and there’s evidence that it was also a money laundry. 
They had good food, too.
In the meantime, someone else took over the busted pizza place. This one is carryout only.
Two years later and he’s still there. Not in the same storefront location, but he’s still there. 
Maybe a lunch truck would be a good front business. If you get too many annoying customers, you can just drive off.
I have a typical hole-in-the-wall bodega type store near me, which is literally butted up against a busy 7-Eleven. They sell bongs, clothing, and other various flotsam. Several online business directories list their business type as “Video tape and disc sales and rentals”, and also say that they have 29 employees and revenues of $2 million a year. Uh-huh.
Interesting to read this resurrected thread…I’ve got two…
A guy I work with helps his FIL in two side businesses. I strongly suspect his family minivan with 3 car seats is a “commercial vehicle” for hauling business supplies.
There is a flea mall I visit where two booths are operated by two brothers. Their items are terribly overpriced and never change, some items have been in the same spot for 3+ years. One brother is a minor administrator in the county planning and zoning office but I don’t see how a flea market can be a front for real estate/building favors… 
Reminds me of some eBay sellers I’ve seen. Is there a way to sell drugs or launder money on eBay? 
When i went to school there was a pizza parlor across the street that sold to students during lunch and at odd hours when students were in class when a lonely customer walked in, they sold weed and meth instead. They were raided around 2009 and the whole family was given lengthy sentences. The place is Subway sandwiches now.
This year there has been a talk about a place that sold beef patis and they never had any food on display or in the kitchen. They never cooked when an occasional customer came in and refused to serve the guy. They too were raided. cops found out that the place a private club of sorts where local small time dealers went down the basement to pick up product from a Indian/Somalian/Paki gang.
Wouldn’t you think Mafia invests in successful businesses? Like skyscraper condos?
I worked for a clipping service years ago. I don’t know how the hell the guy made money out of four women clipping newspaper articles for some clients. It was a very small operation and the guy always had other meetings going on during the day.
That could be a “comfort” place. It fronts as a spa, but the clientele are all men, and the women wear lingerie under their lab coats. You can fill in the blanks.
The sad part is that those places use human trafficking to get their employees.
Aren’t half 24/7 spas that offer massage offer sex for cash?
I was in something like that once – a store that was basically never open, full of 20 year old merchandise. The woman who had run it for decades, and owned the building (including her apartment upstairs) had really slowed down and couldn’t run it full time (or even really regularly part time) anymore, but evidently the concept of ‘full retirement’ wasn’t something she knew about or was comfortable with, and the family thought why push her to close it if it made her happy?
This was a small Spanish town, so not a lot of pressure to use the real estate more efficiently, but I suspect the same kind of thing happens in US cities on occasion, too.
[Zombie note]
I’m currently in the middle of a move, and have hauled out several boxes of financial papers to a local shredding company.
I took 3 boxfuls over Friday morning. What I found odd was I walked into a room with a locked door, had to sign in on a clipboard and then fill out another form (a contract of sorts telling me that my papers will be secure and recycled after ye shredding). I had to ring a doorbell to get someone to open the door and accept my papers.
I got another boxful together today, drove on over-and noticed that only one person had signed in between my two visits. Unless they get a LOT of traffic from local businesses, don’t see how they could stay viable. Combine that with the weird setup…
Printer dealers like this usually do the majority of their work at the customer’s location, not their own office. Printers and other office equipment get delivered, and are later serviced onsite. Their building likely consists of a parts warehouse, and a couple people up front answering phones and doing accounting/billing.
There are a handful of RV places in my travels I feel almost have to be a front for something. There’s never anyone shopping at them. They don’t actually ever seem to be open, despite me driving by them on a variety of days of the week at varying time. And they always seem to have the same number of RVs parked outside - no new stock, no departed stock…
Yeah, I know this is a a 4 1/2 year old post in a zombie thread. I was at that mall today, and the guy was there by his kiosk, which right now “sells” sunglasses. He’ll have something else next month.
And one of the dietary-supplement places closed. They only have GNC now.
For all 20 years I’ve lived at my current location there’s been a chain gas station near me that gets zero business and still has been operational that entire time. Basically it’s in an extremely busy shopping center with a very busy Wal-Mart, an incredibly busy McDonalds (7 cars are always jutting out of the drive-thru) and a few more smaller shops including a Pizza Hut, and its the only gas station for a mile and a half in either direction. However despite all of this there’s never anyone using it because its gasoline has consistently been more than 30 cents more per gallon than the other local gas stations. I pass by that gas station at least twice a week and there’s literally never been more than a single person using that gas station despite its six pumps and most of the time there’s nobody there at all. Also it doesn’t even have a food mart or anything, just a teller at a window and that’s it.
The only possible solution I can think of is that maybe the trucks that bring supplies to the Wal-Mart or McDonalds fill up there but I’ve also never ever seen that either and the pumps roof seems too low to allow semi-trucks to fill up there.
Fireworks stores that are open year-round. There are a few of these in my area and there are never, ever any cars in the parking lots. Why the hell would people be interested in buying firecrackers in January? It’s got to be a front for something unsavory. What that may be I have no idea, the whole situation just makes zero sense to me.
Semis either use truck stops, commercial fueling stations or the trucking company has it’s own pumps.
If you know the right way to ask, the guy will reach under the table and sell you an advent calendar.
You’d think a mall would be the worst possible place to have a front business. In addition to the usual scrutiny a store has from the IRS and various levels of government, you now have the operating group for the mall, plus hundreds of ready-made witnesses in the form of the foot traffic. Weirder stuff has happened though I’m sure 
I guess if it was just money laundering, then you wouldn’t really worry about any of the above. Just the IRS wondering why 99.9% of your transactions were cash.
Much of their business may be going out to large offices and hospitals and collecting documents for shredding. Where I work, there are designated bins everywhere, and a guy comes round every couple of weeks to empty them. They then use a truck-mounted shredder to destroy the documents on site.
I think one of the grocery stores near where I used to live might have been one, or at least my former housemate reckoned so. It looked a bit run down, and had mostly specialist Asian vegetables outside, normally a couple of guys hanging round watching passers by, but none of them seemed to be buying things. Bit of dodgy area, next to a gentrified one. My -Asian- housemate went in once, said the inside looked even more suspicious, with dusty old tins. The staff looked a bit suspicious initially, but then apparently decided he was OK, and not only sold him some vegetables, but charged a ludicrously cheap price, and kept shoving extra stuff in the bag for free, like they were trying to get rid of as much stuff as possible.
He reckoned it might be a drug smuggling thing, with a few extras coming in the vegetable boxes, because there was no way they were making money on the stuff they were selling, but it’s been there for years. There are multiple established Asian fruit and vegetable shops nearby, including a place that does wholesale, so I doubt they’re even supplying restaurants or anything.