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.
businesses that only accept cash are a telltale sign of laundering.
Not necessarily. They could just be declaring 1/2 transactions or something. Which would just be a form of tax evasion I think ?
The auction centre every time they sell art (or whatever some of that stuff is supposed to be).
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. 🤨
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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
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.
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.
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.
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
Used to be a Pizza place in my home town that had $1 large pizza on Wednesday no limit, they were the worst pizza in town, but they were packed every week. It went on for years then they got shut down turns out they were using the increase in foot traffic to cover people coming in to buy drugs.
There’s a place ik that sells VAST pizzas - a slice of that stuff is maybe 70cm long - and they somehow sell each slice for $5. Definitely suspicious profit margins.
My town has like 20+ different barbershops within a couple blocks from each other. They only do the most basic mens haircuts, rarely have any customers, cheap, and cash-only. The business usually lasts for a little over a year, and then suddenly they get some new signage… and another barbershop is reborn! All using similar stock image logos as well.
I went to one a couple years back and I had to basically buzzcut myself to be presentable again.
A lot of these serve as ways to help immigrants gain a stable footing. This is why the staff changes all the time, the business just exists to get the employees a quick work visa so they can enter the country. Once they have better work lined up, they move on.
That might genuinely just be bad business practices though
I have a friend who is a process server, they’ve told me countless stories of going to serve legal papers to a business but the business name had changed and wasn’t the same as on the paperwork so they couldn’t serve the papers
What do you mean? It’s not just a name change, it’s a whole new company with seemingly new owners every time.
I’ve also checked how much it costs to rent there, and they would need to cut over 200 heads per month simply to cover rent. If you throw in a poverty-level salary for a single person, the heads required will triple.
Of course nothing definite, but it sure is a weird cycle.
I was also thinking that businesses are bought and sold all the time. My local mechanic seemed to change owners once every several years.
Yeah if they were expensive it’d be one thing but cheap implies they want traffic
There was a restaurant in my old town that repeatedly opened under different names and in different areas of town. You knew it was the same owners because they had this signature “pink rice” and always had the same menu. Word is they kept getting shut down for not meeting health standards but would just reopen under a different name and location. They’ve finally settled on one place and have been there for probably 5 years now, so they must’ve got their lives sorted. Decent sushi though and they have deep fried ice cream which is top notch.
Those fucking candy shops in London. You know the ones. Also, I used to manage a car wash/detail shop in Florida, and Breaking Bad nailed it.
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Yep, the ones in London are American candy shops too.
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Denmark
but, but you have real chocolate in denmark… why allow such an affront?
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Ladkris
looks fancy. prob can’t afford it.
can afford a few Tony’s Chocolonely here and there, and that’s enough. fucking fantastic stuff.
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Those fucking candy shops in London. You know the ones.
I’m sorry, I’m an ignorant American who’s never been across the pond. I’m also confused by further comments calling these shops “American.”
Could anyone explain?
This article breaks it down.
They’re in very valuable retail locations in the city centre, they sell American brands of candy at unreasonably high prices, and I have never seen a single customer in any of them buy anything.
They look like this
I’ve seen one opposite a cinema, cheaper than buying your sweets inside so it gets plenty of custom. It was the only one around though.
If you used to manage, weren’t you directly involved in the layering of dirty money?
Please do an AMA!
His name is Bogdan
There’s a video rental shop in Houston. Don’t understand how they’ve stayed in business for so long.
Poor people
There’s a gas station just outside of town where the price is always ridiculous. It’s not uncommon for it to be over a dollar more per gallon (about 36¢ CAD/€0,23 more per litre) than the gas station just one block away. I don’t know how it stays in business if they’re not doing something sketchy.
We have a gas station that’s almost a dollar less than competition and opposite corners of another gas station. It always boggles my mind how anyone would go to the more expensive one given you can see the prices of both at the same time.
Back in the early 2000s, when malls were still frequented, there was a tea shop down a dark wing that was rarely visited. I was on a tea bender and visited often, it was always empty. The man who ran the shop was very friendly. He was so friendly that he never failed to overstuff the tea I bought, give me a free hot tea, my choice, even the very expensive tea, on the spot, and heavily discount the tea I did pay for. I recommended him to friends and family, who reported the same experience. Empty shop, free and discounted tea, very friendly.
After a while, he opened up a little. He was from Iran. He had to leave very quickly, but he missed his home country. When asked why he left, he would dodge the question. People I sent to visit also reported his question dodging. He hesitated to say much about Iran beyond its ancient (and very cool) history.
I do not think he was laundering money, but he wasn’t there to make money. My guess is that he was whisked away by the US Government/CIA and given a new home in a quiet town where he could finally relax and just sell tea.
A few times, his older son was in the shop and was always visibly frustrated or bored, and he expressed a strong desire to “go home” back to Iran. The tea shop man tried to hide the seriousness in his tone when asking his son to be quiet. On occasion, his wife was there. She was friendly enough when speaking to you but always had a wary look on her face when you walked into the shop, looking right at your face for the first few seconds. I know that look personally. She was looking for danger in a face.
Even after the mall’s soul died and the anchor stores left, the little friendly tea shop in the dark, empty wing stayed.
That family was not there to make money selling tea. Very, very good tea, might I add. Such a friendly man. I hope they found peace.
That’s lovely. I’m my experience, tea people are special people.
until deprived of tea.
then they’re special monsters.
To be fair, he might not have been hiding from anyone specifically, it could’ve just been they had escaped from a war zone and didn’t want to talk about it.
Yeah, that’s probably more likely.
I hope they found peace.
Well yes, except obviously not now that you’ve told on them and assasins find them.
But up to this point, prolly, yeah.
Theres a pizza store near me that always sells the weirdest pizzas, they have beans on pizza and just about everything else. Nobody ever goes in and ive never seen any deliveries leave.
It would be more unsettling to see people enter, but never leave.
Baked Beans on a pizza is great. It’s like fancy beans on toast
Ive acturally tried it and tbh beans belong on pizza
