Sometimes it’s just a passion project by crazy people. My town has a shack on a busy non-walkable intersection without even parking spaces that sells only angel figurines. Let me be clear, this isn’t general angel knickknacks, this isn’t specific saints, it’s angel figurines ONLY. You will find no bless this house signs. No Christmas tree toppers or ornaments. Not a single holiday decoration, religious or otherwise. You won’t even find Jesus on the cross.
Angel. Figurines. Only. I always assumed it was a front for something until my mom helped with some taxes for them. No, it’s just one crazy couple who are obsessed with the sanctity of the angel figurine. They feel very strongly about it and asking if they do garden angels now that spring’s coming up and you’d love to patronage them is apparently offensive enough for them to take their taxes elsewhere lol.
It’s one of the three mattress stores within 2 blocks of each other, but I’m not sure which one.
Hint: it’s all of them.
In Switzerland it’s either “Barber Shops” or “Döner Shops” their card reading terminals are for some reason always broken and you have to pay cash!
Their card terminal is broken because they can then lie on the taxes on how much they made. They can’t do that with a card transaction.
Not quite money laundering, but for a time thwre was shapp called the ‘Happy Herb Shop’. In the centre of town. Maijuana is still lillegal in AUS
Was too young to get in when it was open, and closed down when I was old enough to go in. :(
Growing up west of Orlando, there was this store in the mall that sold like glass figures and porcelain stuff. Never once did I ever see a customer in there. Multiple stores came and went but that one, there since the mall’s opening, remained. When I worked for EB Games at the same mall, we’d always pass it when we dropped off our money and my manager would say it was a front. Everyone I knew called it the Crack Store.
As a kid there was a pizzeria everyone at school said was a money laundering operation, no one knew of anyone who bought pizza there and it was always open… thinking about it now, the town had about 10 000 people living in it, and there was 6 pizzerias and that particular one was in a very odd place and no signage and i have never seen a menu form them anywhere
There was a dog grooming salon in Nottingham with curtains over the windows. Other than the woman who ran the place, no one (or dog) ever went in or came out that we saw.
The country town my sister lives in had their post office shut down because they were using it as a distribution warehouse for their meth business and most probably money laundering but 100% was running a meth empire from the local post office.
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.
If you used to manage, weren’t you directly involved in the layering of dirty money?
Please do an AMA!
His name is Bogdan
oh yea that tiny indian restaurant with no customers and 10 waiters
Beauty salons. Too many of them. Who is even visiting them?
I suppose the smell of acetone would probably put off police dogs, they’re probably drug related enterprises
This is true in my home town. I know one that dealt heroin a few years ago. I think they used the nail salon to launder.
“La casa de las carcasas”. All Spaniards know it.
At some point in my city there were two shops open in the same street, 100m from each other. Now there’s just one open, but it’s insane seeing six employees inside with such a low volume of customers.
They expanded, they also have shops in Italy now. In big shopping malls, where the rents are insane.
There’s no way they can afford the rents just by selling stupid phone covers.
I found a money laundering deli
It’s amazing, they love having customers as it improves their cover so everything is dirt cheap and really high quality.
Sometimes people come in and the guy behind the register politely shuffles us out with an armful of free cold cuts and a wink
None of you will ever hear about this place from my lips
You think anyone does crime to support their dream of being a shop keeper with good deals?
We need to cook JackbyDev
In my country, it’s the casinos. They naturally receive cash predominantly, and can easily launder millions. Everything else is small potatoes.
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.
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
I was also thinking that businesses are bought and sold all the time. My local mechanic seemed to change owners once every several years.
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.
Yeah if they were expensive it’d be one thing but cheap implies they want traffic