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.
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
The auction centre every time they sell art (or whatever some of that stuff is supposed to be).
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Rug stores. There’s around twelve of them along a couple miles of road. How many rug stores could one city possibly need?
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 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.
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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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.
