Today I was in a part of town I never have before.
I saw a store JUST for badminton.
Well, that’s an incredibly disappointing store … :(
Exactly my thoughts when i checked it out.
I’ve been in a knitting store before. Just yarn and needles and patterns. I can’t imagine how they stay in business.
haberdashers are still relatively common in the UK.
Those are fairly common in North America and in a lot of places in Europe are found everywhere. Knitting is having a resurgence with young people.
There are lots of those. Many people knit.
yep, I have two in the family, it just didn’t seem like there could be enough knitter-foot-traffic to keep the place open selling $4 spools of yarn
That’s because the skeins are $40.
It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a skein of yarn, but surely one can get one for less than that.
hits Amazon
It looks like on Amazon, they start at about $4 individually. If you get a pack, it goes under $1/skein.
Those brick-and-mortar stores much have a pretty substantial markup, unless we’re talking premium yarn of some sort.
Yes, it’s not acrylic baby-melting trash. You’re comparing McDonald’s to omakase. Try visiting your local yarn store before making any more assumptions.
Looking over at the lantern moon knitting needles and the merino wool skeins nervously, as though they’ll start tattling on their costs!
Is that… uncommon? There was one in the town I grew up in.
Actually I looked it up and it also sold thread, ribbons and stuff like that. I guess you’d call it a haberdashery. Maybe one just for wool is less common?
Haberdashery? Poppycock!
Screws. A whole shop especially for screws and nuts, and you could buy bigger boxes, or smaller boxes, or only one or two, and they took their time to give advice, always with the same friendliness and helpfulness, whether you left a few cents or some real money.
I wouldn’t go in there often, but I’d be grateful for it when I did.
We have a ‘Mr Gwint’ shop in my city (‘gwint’ means ‘thread’ in Polish, and the word is probably familiar to The Witcher players). They mainly sell various fastenings, but also tools and other related stuff. They have a big note on the door ‘Only wholesale, no retail. Only full packaging.’ But whenever I went there and asked for some screws, they would sell me much less than the full package. Friendly (to the Polish standards, that is) and helpful, unlike the sign on the door. But I wouldn’t dare asking for just one or two basic screws.
Würth?
I’ve been in a Christmas store that all year long only sold Christmas stuff.
There are at least three of them in Germany.
True story. My niece went into a Christmas shop in our home town looking for a nativity set.
Assistant: “A what?”
“A nativity set - you know, Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus…”
Assistant: “What’s Jesus got to do with Christmas?”
Those stores that only sell Rubber Duckies come to mind.
There are several, for some unknown reason, in Amsterdam.
It’s because of the river, duhh
We live at the same river, but I have yet to find a rubber duck store anywhere closer than Amsterdam - which is hundreds of kilometers from here.
I was being facetious, because otherwise there would be rubber duck stores at every river. Also it would be an environmental disaster if the ducks were for the river
spirit halloween seems just the place for a certain one night event.
For some of us, Halloween is not a night, but a way of life.
indeed. that’s how the store stays alive 😄
There’s a chain of shops in my country that, at least for a while, pretty much only made and sold bean bags. Freaking fantastic ones, too.
Art Smart’s Dart Mart and Juggling Emporium in Milwaukee.
of course it’s on Brady. of course it is
I think my favorite is Nothing Bundt Cakes that sells Bundt cakes. It’s a chain, and yes I only like it because of the pun.
I have read it is ‘nothing but burned cakes’ and thought, that this quite specific and weird.
A good pun will get me in the door every time.
And the delicious cakes will keep you coming back.
Rubber stamp store. Just shelf after shelf of rubber stamps and rubber stamp accessories.
Wouldn’t be a surprise somewhere in Japan, but still pretty cool!
Childhood me gasped. We loved stamps!!
The royal we?
Me and my twin. I just use we a lot cause of that.
My town has a mushroom shop.
Bah, Morrowind has a ton of shops in mushrooms too, a lot of cities have several
An entire store full of african-american romance novels. In a VERY white area. It did not stay open long 😞
The existence of that store feels more like a statement than a business decision
What statement do you suppose they were trying to make?
https://youtu.be/ilsef7LrrYw?is=HrIRX-yHF2gJ8dxa
In all seriousness, I didn’t take the time to really think it through before, but: the store chose a narrow market and went out of business rather quickly, so it didn’t have a good business plan; but it would make an interesting statement to see that store close so fast compared to bookstores which sell romance novels with characters likely to match their clients’ race, which might reveal a sort of widespread casual racism. Or just that readers prefer characters they think they will relate to more strongly. It’s an interesting conversation point whichever way you look at it, is my point.
There’s a store not too far from me that sells rabbits and guinea pigs, and accessories for them. That’s it. Need cat food? A leash for your dog? Fuck off, is not a ‘pet’ store, lol
There are quite a few shops like that for reptiles, likely because of the special care requirements.
On the one hand, you don’t want a minimum-wage no-training staffer who cam barely keep a hamster fed killing a $4000 lizard by not setting the heat and humidity right.
On another, it’s sort of weird to sell pet and feeder rodents together.
Magic stores.
San Francisco has two of them: Misdirections, a store that’s been there for decades, and Houdini’s/Vanishing Inc. in touristy Pier 39 who have a second location near Disneyland.
Also, the San Francisco Archery Shop seems very specialized in this age of big box sporting goods stores, but again they’ve been around for decades it feels like.
As a former archer there are a number of archery shops! I went to one place to buy something and found it very strange that it was just in a row of about 8 shops as part of a small housing estate’s little “high street” - alongside a takeaway, tattoo parlour, beauty salon, funeral director - the kind of thing you need a lot more of than archery shops!
It’s moved now, I assume something more normal has taken its old spot…
Childhood me loved magic stores, the best one I found was in Victoria BC
I have a container that is specifically used to store my flour.
