When I was in college in the nineties I lived in the worst neighborhood of a mid size industrial city. Our nearest store was a large bodega or small supermarket called ‘Pennywise’ that catered almost solely to homeless or near homeless people. They had:
[ul]
[li]Single cigarettes[/li][li]All beer and malt liquor served as cheap singles[/li][li]A couple of washers and dryers with a curtained sitting area so you could wash the clothes on your back and wait in your underwear.[/li][li]A ‘Professional Canner’s Redemption Center’. Our state had a deposit so the homeless would collect cans. Oddly if you were a well dressed college student and tried to return your cans they would turn you away. They only dealt in volume.[/li][/ul]
I always admired their owners for finding a niche and comitting to it.
I walked into a tiny shop in Dublin that only sold hairspray. I had left mine at home so was incredibly pleased to find the place. They had every imaginable kind of hairspray, some in huge bottles “Professional” sizes.
What they didn’t have was pump bottles, they were all aerosol* and all scented. Naturally, what I wanted was unscented, in a pump bottle. D’oh!
*You see kids, people used to be too lazy to pump their fingers up and down to get liquid to spray out in tiny droplets. So the manufacturers put the liquid into metal tubes packed with pressurized Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), or perfluorocarbons (PFCs). These caused a massive hole in the ozone layer, and that’s why you have to wear sunscreen, and why Grandpa has skin cancer. But for three brief, shining decades, you could just press your finger down, and surround your head with a beautiful fine cloud of hairspray, or your underarms with deodorant, or whatever.
The cans also had a terrible tendency to explode in your luggage on an airplane.
Does anyone remember digital audio tape? Perhaps it amounted to something in the world of audio professionals, but for most of us it was the briefest of flashes in the pan. I think it lasted about twenty minutes tops, at some point while regular cassettes were on the decline and compact discs were becoming the standard.
Nevertheless, for many years “The DAT Store” held forth on the south side of Wilshire near 26th Street in Santa Monica. At night they kept the interior lights on and you could see nothing but large cartons and boxes inside. It looked as if the movers had delivered the inventory, but the owners never got around to unpacking it and arranging it on shelves. There didn’t seem to be any shelves on which to arrange things. Through all the years it was open–and I’d swear to at least five–everything continued to look exactly the same, with no boxes ever getting unpacked or even, apparently, moved. I’d usually see it in the evening, so of course I never saw anyone go in or out of the shop. Maybe customers came and went during the middle of the weekdays when I wasn’t around, who knows?
To this day I don’t know if it was a legitimate business or just some kind of front or tax dodge.
Reviving this topic to bring up the fact somehow my town was able to support a Hallmark Store for 5 years that only sold greetings cards, across the street from a Wal-Mart that also sold greetings cards for 99 cents each.
There were several of these on Queen St in Toronto: the Silver Snail and Bakka Books were two.
There was also a bookshop that sold books only about (live) theatre, but I think it’s gone.
Toronto does have the legendary comics store The Beguiling, with its children’s-book offshoot Little Island Books. They support the Toronto Comic Arts Festival every year.
I have found many rare and interesting things at The Beguiling; my latest haul included a reproduction of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. I also found a reproduction of the Voynich Manuscript, but was running out of money and didn’t buy it.
They sell facsimiles of the Voynich Manuscript on Amazon, if your still interested. If you like the Voynich Manuscript you might enjoy a book called Codex Seraphinianus.
Bozeman, MT is home to the nation’s largest supplier of beneficial insects. I learned this while I was living in Bozeman, and searching online for places where I could buy beneficial insects. I was expecting to have to mail-order them; I didn’t expect to be able to just walk up to a counter.
Bozeman also had a Hallmark store that was apparently doing fairly well, but they didn’t only sell greeting cards. They also had mylar balloons, household decorations, Christmas ornaments (for about a third of the year), and assorted other tchotchkes. You could apparently also get items custom-made there: The owner of the store went to my church, and he had a line of stamped-metal ornaments shaped like the church as a fundraiser.
Around here, we had Hallmark Stores in all the local malls until the mid-2000s or so. They sold a lot more than greeting cards, though: Christmas ornaments year-round, various types of desktop chachkis, Swarovski crystal gifts, various types of stuffed toys (my memory is that they were a big retail source for Beanie Babies in the 1990s), candy, and children’s books.
We still have two standalone HallMark stores in the metro area. I know one of them sells a lot the items mentioned above, plus specialty T-shirts.
The tiny town of Baker in Southern California is a common rest stop from being traveling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, has an entire Beef Jerky store called “Alien Fresh Jerky” which is a major tourist spot/trap. Everytime I go the place is completely packed with people buying beef jerky and various other rest stop gimmicks.
At some point a few years ago a SECOND beef jerky store opened there across the street as a competitor, obviously seeing the sheer business Alien Fresh Jerky was doing. I went there once and they had three employees on duty and nobody else there, entire place was a ghost town. They didn’t last long. Looks like the town wasn’t big enough for the both of them.
Austin Minnesota is the home of Hormel, so of course there is a SPAM store. It’s connected to their SPAM Museum (which is a hoot). That’s where my family got some SPAM socks for me for Father’s Day - yay!
I may have mentioned this somewhere. But there was a store that made fresh cut spaghetti. Different flavors and the would cut it right then and there. It was fantastic. I was apparently their only customer. They shut down . It was great but I guess few like real, fresh pasta. Madness I say. I make it from time to time, but it’s a bit of work.
It was next to a bird seed store, which I could not quite wrap my head around. They didn’t make it either.
We have one nearby, which often has 2 for 1 sales with a coupon. There is always at least a few people there in the middle of a weekday when I go. Also delicious. It’s just down the street from a Hallmark store.
As for odd stores, and I might have said this 6 years ago, 30 years ago in Soho in Manhattan or thereabouts there was a store that only sold big things - six foot tall pencils, that kind of stuff. Cool but impractical.
When I was in high school and college there were two specialty SF stores in Greenwich Village. One, Stephen’s Book Service, was the setting for a Barry Malzberg novel. Only went in rarely since there was a more general used book store which sold magazines from the '50s for a quarter each.
. It was great but I guess few like real, fresh pasta. Madness I say. I make it from time to time, but it’s a bit of work.