I forgot about the hamburger place. My sister and I joke that it’s a front for the mafia.
Here’s the deal. The food is really good, but there are almost NEVER any customers, even at “lunch rush” (you can pull up and straight up noon and MAYBE, if you’re really unlucky there will be one other car at the drive-in). And the food isn’t very expensive for how good it is.
Plus, there are frequently gangster types complete with briefcases (in the old Bogart sense of the word) having meetings in the restaurant.
We kid that it’s a money laundering front. Who knows??
In my hometown, there was a very dodgy little shop tucked away in a suburban strip mall which fascinated and frightened my high school friends and I. I’ve forgotten the name of the place, but it probably had something to do with either “imports” or “gifts”.
The place was completely disorganised. A rack of leather jackets here, some dreadful early 80s vinyl 12" records there (still brand new in the plastic). Then there were some random glass cases stuffed with a perplexing array of merchandise. Bars of soap. Cans of cola. Pocket knives. Glass pipes, the kind I guess you would use to smoke crack. Nothing had a price tag on it.
The sole employee, who I assume was the owner, was of indiscriminate ethnic origin, but my friends and I often described him as resembling an Indian Allen Funt. He would greet you with a voice that oozed suspicion and stare you down so that you spent only a few minutes in the place before getting fully creeped out and leaving.
It was legendary among my HS stoner friends–everyone had to go there at least once but nobody ever seemed to have bought anything. I’ve been in head shops and other dodgy shops in various big cities (the kind that sell rubbish–hideous cheap luggage and so on, and are clearly a front for money laundering or suchlike). But I’ve never see a shop that was so incongruous with its surroundings, which had no pretense to being even slightly legit.
Not too far from where I grew up, rumor has it there was a skeleton factory. It evidently assembled (at least, and maybe manufactured outright) those plastic skeletons used in science classes. What I can vouch for was a certain building always had a skeleton hanging over the front door, whether it was Hallowe’en or not.
Of course, my parents never told me about this when I was growing up, or I would have seen an alternative to detasseling for a summer job.
There is a store kind of close by that a coworker and I just call “the Jesus store”. All it sells is religious items, like Jesus socks and t-shirts and books, etc.
That in and of itself isn’t TOO unusual, but the guy who owns it is the only employee, and he’s this 30-something, 400-pound man who just seems a bit…off. We’re pretty sure he lives in his mom’s basement and has some unsavory habits in addition to all the religious stuff.
elmwood - That store probably does most of its business through catalogues, mail-order, and door-to-door sales. They probably have a brick-and-mortar place just for repairs and so they can have a place for empolyee meetings and such.
The reason I know this is that I dated a girl in college whose father owned a franchise of just such a business. I went to his store a couple of times and there was never anybody there. He flat-out told me that he’d prefer it if nobody ever came in there because he preferred generating his business through his salesmen rather than over the counter.
Yeah, I guess they do a decent business with a lunch crowd and selling the whole hams for most of the year, but around Christmas they go just NUTS.
For years my brother has been seasonal help there in December, and he says they work their butts off. (They’re glazing the hams right there in the back.)
I live in a little village (about 300 people) in England. In the centre of the village there is a small shop which has been home to some of the strangest companies. Most of them, the mobile phone store, the wedding dress shop etc, are just strange because they are out of place in such a small village. However, there are two notably strange ones. For a while the shop was owned by a company who sold things made out of cork, such as a cork teapot, a cork hat and a pair of cork shoes. These things were all beautifully arranged in the window but no one ever went in or out. Another time it was occupied by a company who sold huge rolls of paper towels. Lots and lots of paper towels.
There’s a shop I know called Forbidden Planet - it may be part of a chain, but I’m not sure - and it has a quirk someone else has mentioned. It opens whenever the owner feels like it, and he’ll close for weird reasons like rain, or Halloween, or suchlike.
They sell a weird selection of stuff. You can every piece of Buffy merchandise ever sold, I think - similarly with a few other things, like Star Trek and LotR, which isn’t so weird, I guess, but there’s other stuff. They have a rack devoted to BDSM porn, and another one for gay/lesbian porn, and shelves devoted to action figures and odd stuff like plastic farm animals and those little dolls with funny-coloured hair.
What I don’t get is what demographic they’re going for here. You can imagine kids wanting some of this stuff, collectors wanting other stuff, general fans of various films/TV shows wanting this stuff - but why is it all together in the one shop?
Oh, and the other day I saw a Jesus action figure. It was adverstised as having “castors for realistic gliding motion” and being a “perfect gift.” Um… huh?
There’s a store by me that sells three different types of Jesus action figure, plus Buddy Jesus. Other than that quirk, it’s just a regular music store.
There’s a place I pass by on my way to work called “Wonderland,” which I find vaguely creepy myself. At first glance, it seems to be a typical Sanrio-Hello-Kitty type place, which fits with the neighborhood (large Asian population and five schools nearby, plus it’s near a big bus stop).
But after passing it so much, I’m a little suspicious. First, the front is all window, but when the door is closed, you can’t see in. What’s not covered with gaudy pseudo-Japanese stuffed animals is papered up, including the door itself.
Second, the place used to be a laundromat, so I know that the current sales floor takes up about half the available floor space, at the most. Stock room? I doubt it, since there’s usually cardboard boxes all over the floor.
There’s never any one in it.
Except for the usual behind-the-counter lady, who is usually playing Solitare on the computer. She’s a bit of an odd one. I work at a supermarket a block away, and I was coming downstairs from the office, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, looking in no way like an employee. And the public bathrooms are upstairs, so I wasn’t emerging from any mysterious “Employee Only” area. I turn the corner at the bottom of the stairs, about to pass the deli, when she drops from the ceiling in front of me like a bat and screeches “I want fried chicken!” Okay, she didn’t drop from the ceiling like a bat. But it sure felt like it. Seemingly before I was in her field of vison, she screeched at me, eyes wide with the fire of inner vison. Or probably psychosis.
I swear that place has got to be a front for something.
Heh. It is the perfect gift. I own one! It was a Christmas gift from a friend. Probably one of the weirdest gifts I have ever gotten, actually.
He’s staring at me from my book shelf as we speak (the figure, not the friend). It took me the longest time to figure out if it was a joke or not. I finally settled on not. I never pictured Jesus gliding a few centimetres off the ground though. Always struck me as more of a walker.
[/hijack]
Now, for weird stores, I had one where I live that was… odd.
It was The Queensway Court Motel and Casket store. There was the motel, and in the parking lot was a small building that sold caskets. There was a big sign on the street that they both shared. I don’t think they were connected in anyway, but still, creepy.
I don’t know if anyone else will find this strange, but I sure did. We have a local tanning salon with 5 locations, each one is open 24 hours per day. I don’t know if that’s standard practice for tanning salons, but I can’t help but wonder how many people actually go to a tanning salon at 3 AM?
Here in Indianapolis we have an assortment of 24 hour “Laundry and Tan Connection” locations. I guess they figure you have nothing better to do during the spin cycle.
There is a Dry Cleaners right next door to my work which never seems to have anybody inside, but often when I am going to/from work there are these Yakuza-looking types sitting in chairs outside talking in low voices in some language.
This wouldn’t be in Surrey would it? I live quite close to Ascot myself, and I’ve always assumed that this area’s the wealthiest in England. Wouldn’t be too odd to see a betting shop around here though…
I’ve mentioned the “Used Food Store” in another thread. A warehouse-style grocery store whose inventory consisted almost entirely of goods that other stores didn’t want. Damaged cans and dry goods slightly past their “best before” date.
My buddy and I saw a Spy Store on Long Island once. We burst into it and immediately hid behind a rack of cameras, whispering fiercely to the clerk, “Don’t tell anybody we were here!”
Anyway the weird business I’ve seen is called ** “Atomic Exterminating”**. That’s overkill, don’t you think?
“Yeah lady, we can get rid of your cockroaches. In fact, we can get rid of any within 50 miles of your house…”
Every once in a while, when I’m driving places with my friend (never with my own family, mind you) we drive past a place called “Ed’s Dainty Corsages.” I have no idea if it’s still in buisness, but I would love for my prom date to hand me a box that said “Ed’s Dainty Corsages.” I would just get a huge kick out of that.
I saw a garage the other day on Florrissant in North County that was advertising itself as an auto repair and Masonic Temple supply shop. Seemed like an odd overlap. The building it’s in was at one point a house, and the lot is covered in broken-down cars with no appearent place to park. Very odd, really.
I would think that would make the cockroaches about five feet tall and sentient.