The “Water and Donut Store” where they get mad if you ask for donuts, say it’s not the right time of day for donuts (all times of day/night are the wrong time, but there are always three or four stale, lonely donuts in the large glass donut cases) and have a station where you may, for a small fee, fill your water jugs with minimally filtered tap water. 🤨
say it’s not the right time of day for donuts
This feels like it’s taken right out of a video game.
I keep thinking about the pizza store that was opened as a front for the mafia but did such good business that they just quit doing the mafia thing and just sold pizzas full-time
Had an amazing Chinese restaurant near my old place, really excellent food but always completely deserted. They always seemed so surprised that when we called for takeout and whenever we collected it they’d chat about how busy they’d been, and how bus loads of tourists stop by, it just happens to be empty right now… Uhuh. Surrre. I live in this street, I don’t see busses of anyone. But the food was consistently excellent, so they must have actively not advertised because otherwise they’d been super popular.
A maybe-related but maybe-not story: I heard someone talk about walking into an out-of-the-way pizza place. Inside, there were no customers, but there was one employee and there seemed to be a few guys in suits just standing around talking to him. Everyone there was surprised to see anyone walking in, and even more surprised when he ordered a pizza. The pizza took ages to make, like over a half hour, but he did get a pizza; they handed it to him and hustled him out the door without even taking his money. I think they might’ve even locked the door behind him, I don’t remember.
The way the story goes, he took it home and ate it, and it was the absolute best pizza he’d ever had in his life. But every time he tried to go back after that, the place was closed.
Yeah, the one table i saw eating in was a group of young guys in smart suits looking very serious.
I heard a very similar story, except it was one Italian grandma with a bunch of dudes in suits. She proceeded to serve him the single largest, most elaborate, and most delicious Italian dinner he had ever had. Apparently he could see into the kitchen, and she was making everything from scratch. He was there for like two hours, and she just kept bringing more plates out even though he hadn’t actually ordered anything. All because she was so excited to finally have someone to cook for. She even sat with him to chat, and was clearly happy to just have someone except the angry-looking dudes in suits to talk to. IIRC the suits didn’t even take payment before he was ushered out of the door.
He tried to go back like a week later, but the place was totally deserted.
Your story is so familiar, I wonder if maybe I misremembered that one.
Thought I’d read your exact post before even :)
Whoa, this is like…real-time archaeology of my own brain. I know for sure I’ve read this tweet before (when I was writing it, I was about to write “New Jersey” but that didn’t sound right so I left the state off entirely). I bet I probably have also heard the Italian grandma story, and mixed them both in my head because what are the odds that there are three such stories? (including the one I posted originally about the mafia front that went legit because the pizza biz was better).
There’s an Italian restaurant in Denver (Gaetano’s) that was opened in the 40s to give the mob wives something to keep them busy and to launder money. The mob is long gone, but the restaurant is still pretty popular.
It’s good stuff too!
Sounds like the comic book origin story for Godfather’s Pizza.
I miss the little mob money laundering pizza place that I went to as a kid. Absolutely amazing pizza. Never the same after the feds shut down the drug trafficking ring behind it all and deported the owner.
On the flip side, there’s a local pizza place where I currently live that’s fucking terrible. Some of the worst pizza I’ve ever had. It made me wonder how they could stay in business. Then I found out that name of the business happened to also be the name of the local mafia family.
Local places are always one or the other: either they’re the best thing you’ve ever eaten and you can’t wait to get back there and have it again, or they’re just the worst. I guess that applies to mafia fronts, too.
It’s either “Just Socks” the store that sells mostly socks but also some other stuff and is always empty or the vacuum repair shop that hasn’t had a single car in the parking lot for the past twenty years
Used to ship auto parts from a company called ‘Specialty Products Company’.
“what’d you guys sell”
“IDK… ‘Products?’…”
Still not convinced they aren’t a money launderer.
I suppose there could be business in procurement of “specialty products”. These guys do all the shopping around or find someone to make that one odd part you need or figure where to get 50,000 packages of foobar and how to ship/store it while you continue on with your life.
There’s all sorts of brands like that on RockAuto for auto parts. FAMOUS BRAND is one. They sell $7 brake pad sets, maybe it’s a brand that shouldn’t be famous.
There is an “unlicensed” car repair shop in my town. They always service upper-price class, new-looking cars with license plates from far away. Never actually seen anyone working on them, but the suit wearers that collect the cars always seem happy. Not fishy at all, no need to investigate.
Uber
We have several Community Market arrangements in my town. People who make homemade stuff, like decorations, knitwear, art, crafts, jam, soap etc can book a stand for a day or several. It’s extremely exhausting to sit on a shitty chair for 8 hours straight in a crowded place, and especially in the Christmas market when you are half outside and temperatures are close to freezing, so most people book two days in a row at most.
This one group of people just books end-to-end for the entire market duration. Like, weeks. They show up, fill their stand with TEMU crap, and take turns to sit at the stand and consistently sell nothing to nobody.
There was a famous 24h florist in my city that everyone joked had to be a front for something. (Turned out it was drugs.)
Coincidentally, there’s a shop in my neighbourhood that’s also floral-themed and suspicious as heck: it says it sells flowers, but I only see potted plants (that don’t appear to be for sale) and earrings on display stands (which do appear to maybe be for sale) when I peek in the window. I’ve lived here for many years, and I’ve never once seen it open, no matter what time of day or day of the week I walk past. With rent constantly rising and quite a lot of businesses in the street closing or moving away, it seems highly suspicious that this one could be turning a profit without ever being open.
we have what seems like about 15 mattress stores along one stretch of road, and we also have a store that sells nothing but bar stools. I’ve often thought that about those places…
There was a podcast episode about this. I want to say freakonomics or similar.
Iirc, the margins on mattresses are crazy. People will comparison shop, not realizing that many of the stores are subsidiaries of the same company. Stores often don’t have the exact mattress (different models at different stores making pricing matching impossible) so you’re down to making gut decisions.
I’ve heard most of the shops sell the same matrassen, but they just give them different names so you cannot compare prices. Which means you can make prices anything you want as long as you have a somewhat believable story about the quality.
The margins might be high, but I can’t imagine there is enough business to justify that many stores. How often do people actually go buy new mattresses?
Once or twice a day
We have a local chain of antique shops, very high-end
Never see anyone come or go
We’re lousy with antique shops here, but there is this one that is only open two days a week, for a few hours. They just sell thrift store quality junk and discounted (new) disposable kitchenware. They start cleaning 30 minutes before “closing time” and don’t let you in the store.
There is a possibility that all of their real business is online and they just keep the storefront open with the crap stuff so they can claim to be a brick and mortar store.
Unless they’re a distributor or operating under a different name online I can’t seem to find anything
Their 3 separate ornate stores in a town with a population less than 20k do not direct anyone online
Why would a town with less than 15000 inhabitants need 3 laundromats, 3 hand carwashes and 2 mattress stores? The 4 nightshops are also shady.
The first two are businesses that basically run themselves, you only need someone to show up if something breaks, so it’s perfect for someone sitting on a commercial lot.
Mattress stores are also pretty low cost to operate once they’re set up.
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Low sale numbers, so no constant restocking
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The inventory doesn’t really goes bad unless something goes wrong with the storage
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You don’t need many employees
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You can have late(and short) opening times, because who buys a mattress on a weekday morning or late at night?.
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You dont need a fancy showroom, just enough space to show off the different models.
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Many of them are basically just big sheds on the outskirt of town. In fact, I’ve often seen one of those manual carwashes in the same lot off the side off the road as a mattress store.
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And the profit margin is usually pretty high
Damn, mattress stores around here are all super fancy with two that make the mattresses they sell…
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The laundromats and carwashes don’t seem that strange. My home “city” of not even half a million people has 20 laundromats I could find on Google Maps and more carwashes than would seem reasonable. I don’t know what’s a reasonable number of furniture and mattress stores because one big place sucks up most of that business, but even with that, we’ve got at least a dozen different places to get mattresses.
I feel this way about mattress stores. Can’t prove it either.
oof snopes is as enshittified as the rest now I see
There’s multiple tiny Mexican restaurants in my town that I 100% know are run by the cartel. Like,I know the manager didn’t buy a $100k dodge Durango hellcat selling burritos and tacos in a farm town.
I don’t fucking care though, the tacos are good.
There’s a donut shop near me that’s only open from 1am to 10am. If that’s not suspicious then I don’t know what is.
They want drunk people and breakfast crowds. Sounds like a solid business plan to me
The best donut spots in my town are all sold out of donuts by 10a under most normal circumstances. Usually they just close up whenever they sell out, but list 10a as their “official” closing time
