Asklemmy

At least one of the three lamp stores within two miles of each other here. mf i've never seen anyone walk into a lmap store in my life, have you?

Pretty to drive past at night though

Our small, rural town had a bar change hands a couple times over the past few years. One day several murdered out Mercs, one an AMG, start parking in front of it. Not to stereotype, but they were greased up, wearing tracksuits and gold chains, guys from the Balkans are driving those cars and operating the bar. Never went in while they were around, but within a year, one of those guys got caught by DEA trying to move some serious weight of cocaine and meth.

The bar shut down pretty quickly after that.

It's gone now but for a long time we had a 24hr fruit shop.

Almost any cash only retail business in 2023 is highly suspect outside of some outlier situations like rural markets

There's one that's a limo service that's shady af

Not my town, but the town I used to live in had a store that appeared to only sell very old lampshades from the 1970s and I never saw a single customer go in there but it was always open. I'm 100% sure it was a front for the local crime syndicate.

There’s a macaron shop near my work that has no business (!) being that large, downtown. It has a very fancy shopfront and website, I’ve called to pretend to order one time and it was quite expensive.

I’ve never even seen cars/vans/bikes/whatever taking away their order there (it’s delivery only).

It’s super weird, macarons are not even that popular around here, theres another better known macaron place that is tiny compared to this one

We have a scrapbooking store in town that never seems to have business, if it's not a front it's a way to keep the family from getting inheritance

There is a solar tanning parlor of sorts in a street close to us. I might just live in a bubble where noone would ever go to one of those parlors, but it seems to be open pretty late, and it feels like there are often some unsavoury people going in/coming out. It's become a running joke that it's a front, to be honest don't have a clue but I wouldn't surprise me.

There's a bar here that is a money wash for an outlaw biker gang. Everyone knows it. It's the worst kept secret in this town.

All my landlord's business associates are in the paradise papers. And half of his LinkedIn contacts are russian, so ...

For anyone familiar with the south hills of PGH: the Baltimore House

There used to be one I just couldn't understand. It was one of those stores you commonly see on the road side with many products related to our local culture. They could theoretically make a ton of money selling that stuff to tourists if the store was next to a gas station or something, but it was deep inside the town in a very low traffic street, with no advertisement. Non-tourists would have a need for their products once every few years at most and it could be found on regular stores as well. There was just no way that store could be profitable.

But then they started selling rotisserie chicken and I became their regular. A couple years later they shut down.

Absolutely - our local smoke shop in my towns plaza.

Classic answer of a mattress store. We have a very busy interesting in town, and they are on all 4 corners. Prime real estate, never a car in the lot.

There's a beauty supply place where the inside of the store is just rows and rows of generic amazon junk. The thing is .. that place gets extreeeemely high amounts of traffic and people even leave their engines running while visiting this place. It's just so suspicious seeing as the place is just a junk-shop for amazon teir beauty supplies

There's an Indian restaurant near me that has been there for years. I've never once seen more than 2 people in there and rarely any ubereats. I once went in to buy samosas and they seemed surprised. It's not a cheap neighborhood so I'm certain the place is a front more than anything.

When I lived in Burlington Vermont, the owner of the skate shop "ridin' high" got in trouble because he was selling drugs out of the skate shop.

Classic.