…but it isn’t really a destination store, is it? I mean, if you have a Walmart, you probably have a Canadian Tire.
Ikea, Forever 21, pretty much every high end clothing brand ever created, and Olive Garden are all destination stores around here, being a 5+ hour drive away.
There must be a wide variety in sizes of HMart – the one near my house is fairly dinky and I can’t imagine anyone would go out of their way to visit it.
Fifteen years ago, it always seemed like a treat to make a pilgrimage to The World’s Biggest Bookstore, but it’s less exciting nowadays.
The one by me in Niles IL is HUGE. The produce department is bigger than any other store I’ve seen and is the only place I can get weird stuff like durian, it has a Best-Buy, several cosmetic stores, a housewares department on par with the one in a Sears store and a food court, and to top it all of it’s cheap as shit!
Whole live lobster is usually about $2/lb and the rest of the seafood is dirt cheap and fresh as can be too.
Vermont Country Store. My family was driving thru Vermont a few years ago, and we passed by this. I had been reciving the catalog for years but never thought of the actual store. I gasped aloud and yelled “Stop! Turn around! Go back!”
My husband thought someone had died. But no, I just wanted to go shopping.
I’ve planned and executed an entire 2 week vacation around a trip to Sydney, Nebraska to visit Cabela’s. Well, it actually went: fly to Seedro Wooley, WA, jump in my cousin’s truck and drag the the trailer through Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming and Oregon on the way to and from Mecca. You have to love a store that has it’s own KOA.
No, but funny you should ask. They’re expanding into Saratoga (probably won’t hurt Lyrical Ballad, which specializes in used books) and, as promotion, had Neil Gaiman speak at the Saratoga City Center and sign his latest book. I was there. 
Powell’s City of Books. You can get lost in this place.
Also any Lee Valley store. My happiest place on earth.
I used to have fantasies about Northern Tool until one moved to the town where I lived. The catalog is much cooler than the execution of the store, which was a tad dirty and poorly organized.
Pilgrim’s Bookstore, Kathmandu, Nepal. The very first place I thought of, (though reading through the thread it appears Americemtric, so perhaps my suggestion is out of place, I don’t know.)
It’s an epic bookstore, somewhat famous to travellers, and definitely worth seeking out. They are even on line now!
Me three.
Maybe it’s because we don’t have them here, but I love hitting the Christmas Tree Shops when I’m back east.
I used to drive a fair hour to Global Foods, a pan-asian, pan-latino megamarket in Manassus, VA. Latino markets I get, asian markets I get, but the mashup is strange and spectacular.
Cabela’s (same atmo as the Bass Pro shops). I use to visit one near the Ohio border, and interestingly there’d usually be lots of Mennonites shopping there in traditional dress. (Mennonites, in that area at least, use cars).
The Williamaburg Pottery Factory – another one that started small then sprawled out of control with random additions. You keep turning corners and finding new, wierd stuff. Very little of it pottery. To add to its charm, it was busted and ramshackle in every way imaginable, but I hear in 2010 it was fixed up.
In Europe there are malls which are outside of towns so you need to drive (or take a bus, if available), but I haven’t seen anything like the “nothing but stores ‘villages’” I saw in the US… at least that also requires driving. Something that would be similar to those but very much in an urban setting would be Barcelona’s “Spanish Village”, which was built for the 1929 Expo (no assumptions that people would drive): every house is a copy of one in a different location and the stores sell handcrafts; I love being able to watch the glassblowers at work.
“(Christmas) shopping in London” has long been a “thing” with a certain type of Spanish woman - at least most of them have the sense not to stop at Mango or Zara when they go shopping to Oxford Street. But hey, I’ve also seen planeloads (some of them literal: large groups bussed in from a chartered plane) in Spanish department store Corte Inglés in Madrid, Pamplona or Barcelona; apparently we trade shoppers.
Oh, I forgot about those. Christmas Tree shops are cool and not all about Christmas at least not completely but it is a little spooky to go into one in June or July and seeing the customers (almost always older ladies) preparing for the Christmas festivities in mid-summer. It is like the domestic twilight zone. That is just the tip of the iceberg though. There are dedicated Christmas only stores in several places on the East Coast and at least one Christmas theme park in New Hampshire. It is really strange to go to one of those when it is 90 degrees. It makes me feel like an Australian.
Ayuh. Santa’s Village, and The Christmas Dove, the later of which I believe has three locations, though I’ve only been to the ones in MA and NH. And unlike the Christmas Tree Shop, the Christmas Dove(s) has Christmas decorations for sale 365 days of the year.
The only places I’ve ever really gone out of my way to shop at are the little stores in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. They’re nothing special, but I bet many of my fellow northeasterners have been drawn there at least once. It’s not the same since they renovated the strip a few years back, though 
I live in the sticks, so everything but Wal-Mart is kind of a destination store.
Jungle Jim’s is definitely a favorite. We get up there a couple of times a year, and I might as well hand them $200 when I walk in. It’s actually kind of exhausting and disconcerting after a while; fortunately there’s a coffee shop where you can sit and recombobulate yourself in the middle of an afternoon-long spree.
Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington was such a store for a long time. Up until the mid-90s it was a big bookstore for the time perched at the end of a small mall and shopping center. J-B was booming while the rest of the mall was struggling, so at some point it just assimilated the entire indoor space of the mall. This was before Borders and B&N had their big stores everywhere, so I had never seen a bookstore like it before. I still shop there whenever I’m in town although I only buy a fraction of what I used to. It has threatened to close a few times but has always avoided it somehow.
Liquor Barn in Lexington and Louisville is probably worth a drive to stock up if you live in a place with crappy booze selection or in a state with mediocre state-run liquor stores.
Since moving to Texas, I have had to make Trader Joe’s a destination store, but things are looking up. We got one in San Antonio last year (2 hour drive) and the first of two Austin area stores is opening in September (only 1/2 hour away! Woohoo!).