Weird Businesses in Your Area

In My Humble Opinion
1

Tell me about weird businesses in your area. By “weird” I mean:
[ul]
[li]Weird merchandise.[/li][li]Weird hours.[/li][li]Weird decor.[/li][li]Weird employees/owner.[/li][li]Generally weird “vibe.”[/li][/ul]

I’m inspired to write this thread by a place that I visited the other day. It’s an outdoor sports shop a few blocks from my house.

First, its hours: It’s NEVER open on Sundays (not unusual in conservative central Illinois). Monday thru Saturday it’s open whenever the boss feels like opening it. Some days it doesn’t open at all. Other days it opens as early as 8AM or as late as 3PM. It closes as early as 6PM and as late as 11PM.

Once inside, the place has all the charm and decor of a machine shed. Concrete floors with oil stains, never been swept. The walls have one or two posters of big-boobed girls holding power tools. The check-out area is a little booth with a calculator and a receipt book. There is no cash register.

The merchandise consists of about two dozen vehicles (not sure what they’re called) that look like souped-up go-carts wtih roll cages, and about two dozen used mopeds, motorcycles and motor scooters, all in various stages of rebuilding. BUT, and here’s the funny part: though they all have price tags on them, they’re behind a rope with a big “DO NOT ENTER” sign on it: :eek:

On one of the windows there is a cartoonish painting of a guy on a jet-ski. Inside there is not a jet-ski, Waverunner, or any other kind of boat to be found.

The funniest part of all: the business does not have a name. Nowhere. Not on the outside of the building, not on the inside, nowhere. I asked one of the employees what the name of the business was, and he said “Uh, I dunno. Bud’s Powersports maybe… Hey Bud, what do you call this place?” Bud looked at him and shrugged his shoulders and went back to work on his crossword puzzle. I asked the guy who I should make a check out to, should I want to buy something, and he said “We don’t take checks.”

As I left the place, I got the impression that they don’t really want to do business with me (or the general public) unless it’s unavoidalbe, and that 99.9% of their clientele consists of people who buy, sell, trade and re-build motorcycles and souped-up go-carts for and from one another. Weird.

So, any weird business in your neck of the woods?

2

I’m in one of the wealthiest towns in southern England (and living on a teacher’s salary…ooh, the fun). Just down the street from me is a betting shop. It only opened up a few months ago, and it’s just all out of place. I mean, it’s right next to a posh Italian restaurant, a kiddies’ toy shop, and a women’s apparel shop. Is sports gambling really that big of a hobby here? Apparently so.

3

In the neighborhood I grew up in, there used to be a store that sold … beer cans and brewerania. From what I remember, the place was open only four days a weel, I think Wednesday through Saturday, 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

In another Buffalo neighborhood, one which went further down the tubes than the place I grew up in, there was a relic of a retailer that was in business until just recently - a fedora store. It’s amazing that their business lasted so long after 1960, but apparently they held on. Are there still any real hat stores – not baseball cap, but old fashioned hat stores – in business anywhere outside of NYC?

Buffalo also had several Catholic supply stores; shops that sold nothing but Virgin Mary statues, candles, and other items related to Catholic rituals, apparently for religious do-ot-yourselfers.

There’s a store not far from where I live now that sells nothing but air and water purifiers - “The Good Living Store.” Whenever I walk by, I never see any customers in the place, but occasioanlly, there will be some sort of meeting or something going on; several folks just sitting in chairs arranged in a circle. That’s another category I’d like to add - the business where you never see any customers, yet it’s been there forever and you have no idea how they make money.

A few doors down from the air filter store is a store that sells nothing but parts scrapped from elderly computers; 500 megabyte hard drives, 12" monitors, ISA network cards, ancient AT cases, 5 1/4" flippy drives, and so on … along with computers made up from what are apparently the best scrapped cards they get. The personalities of the employees are along the lines of “Nick Burns: Your Company’s Computer Guy” and “The Comic Book Store Guy.”

Across the street is a gunsmith. I’ve never seen it open, but apparantly the place is in business.

4

There’s a big discount warehouse near where I live, or at least it calls itself a discount warehouse - I think it used to be a wholesaler’s and that it just started opening its doors to the public at some point.

First off, everything is priced without the VAT (which is not unusual for, say computer equipment in a magazine advertisement, but is pretty strange for price-ticketed good in a retail environment).

There are cash registers, but they ring up your good, then hand you a receipt which you take to a separate cashier’s window to pay for (I’m guessing that is just the way they have always done it)

5

Did the hamburglar just steal a few of the letter S from that post, or is my keyboard on the way out?

6

On Route 22 in NJ there is a Honey Baked Ham store. That’s all they sell – just honey-baked ham. Just before holidays we’ve seen people lined up out the door and around the side.

7

I have been waiting for a thread like this to tell my story. I lived in Worcester, MA for a number of years and there were two businesses that fell into this category.

The first and wackiest was the local bowling alley. To be more precise there were two bowling alleys at each end of town owned by the same person or company. Bowling alleys were a dime a dozen in my blue collar town so no surprise there.

I passed the establishments all the time while driving to and fro and they always had a large sign on a pole advertising leagues, or the specials they were having. One day at both places these innocuous messages were replaced by Ask Us About Our Whips and Leather. So you don’t get the wrong idea they remained bowling alleys. They just added large display cases inside the front door of bondage equipment. I still wonder what they were thinking.

The second was an ice cream shop. The only odd thing about this place was that it was right next to a college and its hours of operation were bizarre. Monday-Friday 8-3, Saturday Closed, Sunday 9-2. Who the hell buys ice cream at those hours. In college I didn’t wake up until two sometimes. Not surprising that my only memories of that establishment are arriving to find it closed.

8

Honey Baked Ham is a national chain; they’re all over the place, and they all sell nothing but ham. Really, really expensive, really, really tasty ham.

There’s a rent-to-own tire store near here. Living off the folks from the projects, I guess. I mean, rent-to-own TIRES?

In Georgia, outside Army bases in particular they have title pawn shops. That’s right, go hock your car title. Talk about the Quick Road to Repossession.

And I still remember a store in California called the Legal Grind – a combination law office and coffee shop.

9

In a nearby town there is a place called theMoon Marble Company, which makes…uh…marbles. Is there that much of a call for marbles these days? Plus the building it’s in is in a creepy part of town, right next to the railroad tracks and I think it used to be some kind of old railroad warehouse. I guess it’s a pretty popular place, but I’ve always thought it was weird.

10

That is strange … sound almost Soviet.

When I was a kid, there were lots of hot dog stands throughout the Buffalo area that had separate windows for ordering hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, and pop/soda. There were also separate windows for paying for each separate item. It was strange, but among old-timers in the Buffalo area such places are fondly remembered.

11

elmwood: Lots of amusement parks/fairs/carnivals still operate food outlets like that.

12

In the Detroit suburb of Southfield, we have the “Spy Store” which sells high tech survelliance/anti-survelliance equipment and other assorted Bondesque items. I always thought that was kinda weird(definately cool though).

13

Well, Calgary has “Colour Code Insoles” which hits on 4 of your 5 weirdness criteria (I’ve never interacted with anyone who works there so I can’t comment on weird employees or owners). It’s actually moved to a nondescript strip mall, but let me tell y’all about the original weird-o location:

Weird Merchandise: A bit of an unknown. Noone seems to really have any idea what the hell “colour code insoles” might be. But it does sound odd to me.

Weird hours: Kind of a Monday 8:45 - 11:30 and 2:00 - 6:00 or something. Every day has its own wacky schedule like that.

Weird decor: A sign that has a silouette of a foot going into a shoe. Dirty venetian blinds that are always closed. Next to a pizza/chinese food take out place whose own signs take weird to a brand new level.

Weird employees: :confused: see first paragraph.

General weird-o-rama vibe: plenty. I’ve been tempted to go in and find out just what the business might be about, but I’m afraid of sauntering into some “Pulp Fiction” Butch-and-Marcellus-meet-the-gimp style situation.

Maybe I’ll phone.

14

I didn’t go in, based on the window decoration and the fact they were never once open. This one Mexican food restaurant had gotten somebody to paint, very crudely, what appears to be the head and shoulders of a young woman in a sombrero on a table. It looks for all the world as if she’s being served up as the main course with that sombrero as a festive garnish. They’re out of business now, but I still have to pass that disturbing picture every day, blurk.

15

Sir and/or Madam do you speak of the one in South Plainfield near the former location of the Watchung Flea Market and just before the Watchung police dept?

16

There is a store-front a few blocks from my apartment for a cleaning company that specializes in cleaning up blood and guts from crime and suicide scenes.

Yeesh.

17

We have a tiny little tourist shop called Oomingmaks.

They make stuff… sweaters, scarves, mittens, etc, out of muskoxen hair.

We have a country kitchen type restaurant owned and operated by two maiden aunts. The hours of operation are anybody’s guess.

They have excellent food, but there’s no guarantee that it will be open.

18

There used to be a small shop in the town where I went to HS called Babylon Gifts. It was open until nine every night, which is slightly odd for a supposed gift store. We eventually ascertained it was probably a front for some small-time drug dealing; inside, there was a shelf of bumperstickers, a few random t-shirts, and an enormous display of ‘tobacco smoking accessories.’ Mmm-hmmm.

19

No head shop in the states is gonna be cought dead with drugs on the premises. And nine is the standard closing time for most head shops. Although it gets weird when the headshops have a 21 and over section, when the legal age for everything but booze is 18 in your area, and they dont have a liquor liscence…
-PSM

20

An office near downtown where I live had a sign hanging out of it name changed to protect the guilty):

J. Martin Briggs
Man About Town

I never bothered to inquire what sort of business the fellow supposed he was in, but I probably should have.