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Single-Purpose Shops

illuminati37411 said:
The Christmas shops here switch into Swimming Pool Shops in the summer.

There was a weird storefront near my house a number of years back, with front windows covered over with paper so you couldn't see inside. Up above on a display shelf was an inflatable snake, about 3 ft. long, and a wooden dove. It was freaky. I peeped thru a hole in the door once and inside the air conditioner was running and I saw tables and chairs and a coke machine. Empty as hell though. Actually I think it was a private night club, pretty common here, but I liked to pretend it was the meeting place of a terrible and secret society of voodoo wizard. I still think the snake and dove were kinda weird.

Saturday Night Live had a running gag about the shopping mall with the Scotch Tape Shop. Nothing but tape.
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There is a place like that by me....the facade made me think it looked like an old bar with the sign painted over. And there were strange bric a brac objects in the windows cases, however one couldn't see in because the backs of the cases were covered in anchient christmas paper. I walked up to the door and tried to open it because I heard noises but it was locked.....somehow I managed to peek through some hole (I was very determined) and saw a very large bar with an old tv on a metal stand at the very back facing me. It had one of those giant antannea and it was on.
No person in sight though.

The place was filled with antiques...there was even a mezzanine with old chairs and paintings hanging off of the railing. But I saw no one....and every time I pass by hoping to get in since the gates been down.
 
bosskR said:
Watching The Avengers, I have learned that these shops are all fronts for various sinister organisations plotting a new world order.
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Yes!
They are!
Just be carefull next time you go to get a shirt tailored, or take dancing lessons, as they may be on to you already!
 
There is a shop just opened in Inverness that sells vinegar and oil only, don't know that it will do that well.
Up until recently there was another shop that sold touristy things in spring/summer and was a christmas shop the rest of the year.
 
Now I think about it, I remember a shop that was near me when I lived in Peterborough. It was a bread shop - all it sold was bread, nothing else.

It only lasted a few months before it closed down.

Selling just one product hardly seems like a recipe for success.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Now I think about it, I remember a shop that was near me when I lived in Peterborough. It was a bread shop - all it sold was bread, nothing else.

It only lasted a few months before it closed down.
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The backers ran out of dough...
 
In Ipswich we have the wonderful Memorable Cheeses, although they have just moved to larger premises and sell chutney, biscuits and the like.

There used to be a shop in Stafford that just sold Darts and associated stuff.

When I lived in Scarbrough I used to drink in a club where the front looked like a shut down bakers but if you went down the side ally and knocked in the door and little hatch would open and a man would look you up and down before letting you in!!
 
In Scandinavia you can find plenty of shops selling only cheese. I imagine if they started selling other products, those might just end up smelling like cheese.
There´s a shop in town(Lund, Sweden) which seems to make a business of just refilling people´s used ink cartridges. They don´t sell printers or computers, they just refill ink cartridges.
 
Leaferne said:
Sorry, James, guess I'm a little confused here: what's so intrinsically odd about a homebrew shop? There are a couple here in my city. Or are you commenting on its never-open state?
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Single-purpose home-brew shops aren't common this side of the pond, though many pharmacies and supermarkets have a dusty corner devoted to the stuff. There has been a cheap booze policy in the UK for years, which has made home brewing less attractive than it used to be. Anyway, I think our new Chav class lacks the patience to wait for yeast to work and the rubber tubes would probably be ruined every time they needed to locate a new vein. :(
 
I know there's a home brew shop in Farnborough, cunningly called The Home Brew Shop. It's an odd place (to a non-brewer like myself at any rate), but fascinating.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Leaferne said:
Sorry, James, guess I'm a little confused here: what's so intrinsically odd about a homebrew shop? There are a couple here in my city. Or are you commenting on its never-open state?
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Single-purpose home-brew shops aren't common this side of the pond, though many pharmacies and supermarkets have a dusty corner devoted to the stuff. There has been a cheap booze policy in the UK for years, which has made home brewing less attractive than it used to be. Anyway, I think our new Chav class lacks the patience to wait for yeast to work and the rubber tubes would probably be ruined every time they needed to locate a new vein. :(
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Ah, see, you live in a civilized country; here the only way my transplanted Banburian bf can afford to drink like he's still at home is to make his own.
 
There's a store I visited in San Francisco, that sells nothing but pirate supplies (Although they also run some sort of artist's cooperative). When I worked in the smallish town of Kenora, Ontario, there was a store that sold pets and Wiccan supplies.
 
Then we have these "World Of" type stores - World of Leather (oo-er), Sofa-World and so on. Makes me wonder how specialized the produce and how unimaginative the names may eventually become . . . suggestions on a postcard, please! :D
 
Lanark_And_Rima said:
More troubling to me is a shop nearby which sells only crap. It's a second hand shop, so that's perhaps to be expected, but you really would have to go out of your way to assemble such a quantity of old, broken things that no one would concievably want to buy (their books section isn't even interesting from a comedy point of view). The particularly uninteresting things in their window haven't been changed for at least three years, either...

I smell a front.
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Every so often in England at least, the police in an area will start up a secondhand shop, to catch the dafter variety of burglar trying to fence stolen goods.
 
dan_uid0 said:
Every so often in England at least, the police in an area will start up a secondhand shop, to catch the dafter variety of burglar trying to fence stolen goods.
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Oh bugger! :oops:
 
JamesWhitehead said:
This was one of those archetypal never-open shops. Perhaps, by appointment, once every decade it would admit customers. The odd thing is that it lasted for many years. For all I know, it may still be there!
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In the town of Padiham in Lancashire, on the end of the same block which harbours the local Masonic lodge, is a shop called the "Victoria Rose Centre". It is never open, and has remained in a blank-windowed, locked state for years.

What it is, was, or might be is completely unknown; I'm also fairly convinced that apart from being seemingly completely immune to parking tickets for parking on double yellow lines, the adjacent Masons are completely innocent.
 
rynner said:
dan_uid0 said:
Every so often in England at least, the police in an area will start up a secondhand shop, to catch the dafter variety of burglar trying to fence stolen goods.
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Oh bugger! :oops:
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At least you didn't get caught by the one which South Yorkshire police ran in the late 1990s. What they did was take a lane which was a dead-end, with a wood at the end which was clearly marked on the OS maps.

Then they repeatedly announced that a flying saucer had been seen landing in that area, and ordered several (ficticious) callsigns to attend immediately.

There was no saucer, and no aliens. There were however several policemen lurking behind a hedge near the bottom of the wood, and when a procession of antenna-bedecked cars came trundling down to investigate, said police nipped out behind them and arrested all present, on the charge of listening to (and acting on) information broadcast on police radio.

Shortly afterwards, they pulled the same trick elsewhere, except that time they used the excuse that some robbers had blown up a safe in a wood, and could the police kindly go to the wood and collect the banknotes scattered through the wood (the dynamite artists having vanished in embarassment) before anyone else did.

Once again, a confiscation of radio scanners was made, and several amateur radio enthusiasts departed, sadder and wiser men.
 
dan_uid0 said:
JamesWhitehead said:
This was one of those archetypal never-open shops. Perhaps, by appointment, once every decade it would admit customers. The odd thing is that it lasted for many years. For all I know, it may still be there!
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In the town of Padiham in Lancashire, on the end of the same block which harbours the local Masonic lodge, is a shop called the "Victoria Rose Centre". It is never open, and has remained in a blank-windowed, locked state for years.

What it is, was, or might be is completely unknown; I'm also fairly convinced that apart from being seemingly completely immune to parking tickets for parking on double yellow lines, the adjacent Masons are completely innocent.
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Ahh, Padiham, land of the thicknecks. ;)

(To those not from around this part of the world, an explanation might be in order.
In long gone days, Padiham was supplied with water from a resovoir up in the hills above Padiham and for years people were at the doctors complaining of swellings in the neck called goiters. They finally traced the cause to be the water from the resovoir and cleaned it up, the goiters disappeared and to this day people from Burnley, like me, call people from Padiham 'thicknecks.')
 
Here in Bath we have a shop dedicated to large ladies shoes size 8 and upwards. We also used to have one that only sold fairy related items, apparently the fairy queen held parties in the basement for little girls :?
 
There used to be one of those fairy shops in Marlborough as well. It closed a couple of years ago, I think
 
This is not a single purpose shop, but I just loved the combination. I was in Malmo, Sweden today and saw a nice looking building with two floors. The ground floor was a children´s bookstore, and the upper floor a rehab clinic. :D
 
where my mate grew up there was a potato & egg shop. it was called the potato and egg shop. my mate wrote a song about it called "potato & egg shop".
 
flashingturtle said:
where my mate grew up there was a potato & egg shop. it was called the potato and egg shop. my mate wrote a song about it called "potato & egg shop".
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Reminds me of a sign outside a farm on the way to Southpot years back...

"New laid eggs & potatoes"... often wondered what laid the potatoes.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Leaferne said:
Sorry, James, guess I'm a little confused here: what's so intrinsically odd about a homebrew shop? There are a couple here in my city. Or are you commenting on its never-open state?
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Single-purpose home-brew shops aren't common this side of the pond
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Having said that, I retract it, as the imposter said to the rabbi.

I pass a home-brew shop on the way in to work. Middleton, Gtr. Manc.

Not that it's ever open. So they remain mysterious to me. If I got up later and could spend longer brewing, maybe they would be my best mates. :) [/b]
 
Timble2 said:
Reminds me of a sign outside a farm on the way to Southpot years back...

"New laid eggs & potatoes"... often wondered what laid the potatoes.
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On the drive to Skegness there is a farmer with a permanent sign at the roadside which reads
"FRESH DUG NEW TATES"
When its no longer new potato season he drapes a sack over the "NEW".
 
Here in Honolulu there's a store not too far from downtown that sells only chickens, fertile eggs, and eggs with partly developed chicks (which are considered a delicacy by some people).
 
JamesWhitehead said:
JamesWhitehead said:
Leaferne said:
Sorry, James, guess I'm a little confused here: what's so intrinsically odd about a homebrew shop? There are a couple here in my city. Or are you commenting on its never-open state?
Click to expand...

Single-purpose home-brew shops aren't common this side of the pond
Click to expand...

Having said that, I retract it, as the imposter said to the rabbi.

I pass a home-brew shop on the way in to work. Middleton, Gtr. Manc.
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Yeah, there's a big one on Gloucester Road in Bristol too, which has been there for years, and seems to have resisted the urge to become a Tesco Metro (every twentieth shop on that four miles of road is a Tesco something or other.)
 
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