Name them

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.
- 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.
- That's lovely. I'm my experience, tea people are special people.
  
  until deprived of tea.
  then they're special monsters.

Every mattress store you’ve ever seen is likely a front for some shady shit.
- You think the money is under the mattress?
- Came to say this

There used to be a coffee shop in my town. Every day they had a two-part secret phrase that would let you get drugs, but it sounded like an order. I think I activated it one time. "Can I please get a double-double with whip cream?" "Sure. How's your dog Mittens?" "I have no dog?!" Later, the coffee shop shut down because they got caught drug trafficking. They would double cup the coffee orders that had the drugs, and put the drugs in between the paper cups.
- That's a fun way to do it.
- I remember reading a story about something like that at KFC. And the code phrase was you wanted an extra biscut or something.
- This was an entire episode of Castle (the guy from Firefly) except it was a Pizza shop.
  
  I've never seen Castle, but I was pretty sure you were referring to Nathan "the guy from Firefly" Fillion. Ouch.

Nah they make good steak and shrimp and they don't bother me so Ima leave them alone. There are much bigger criminals to worry about in this country than shady local businesses.

I keep thinking about the pizza store that was opened as a front for the mafia but did such good business that they quit doing the mafia thing and just sold pizzas full-time
- There’s an Italian restaurant in Denver (Gaetano’s) that was opened in the 40s to give the mob wives something to keep them busy and to launder money. The mob is long gone, but the restaurant is still pretty popular.
  
  https://gaetanositalian.com/
  It's good stuff too!
- Had an amazing Chinese restaurant near my old place, really excellent food but always completely deserted. They always seemed so surprised that when we called for takeout and whenever we collected it they'd chat about how busy they'd been, and how bus loads of tourists stop by, it just happens to be empty right now... Uhuh. Surrre. I live in this street, I don't see busses of anyone. But the food was consistently excellent, so they must have actively not advertised because otherwise they'd been super popular.
  
  A maybe-related but maybe-not story: I heard someone talk about walking into an out-of-the-way pizza place. Inside, there were no customers, but there was one employee and there seemed to be a few guys in suits just standing around talking to him. Everyone there was surprised to see anyone walking in, and even more surprised when he ordered a pizza. The pizza took ages to make, like over a half hour, but he did get a pizza; they handed it to him and hustled him out the door without even taking his money. I think they might've even locked the door behind him, I don't remember.
  The way the story goes, he took it home and ate it, and it was the absolute best pizza he'd ever had in his life. But every time he tried to go back after that, the place was closed.
- I miss the little mob money laundering pizza place that I went to as a kid. Absolutely amazing pizza. Never the same after the feds shut down the drug trafficking ring behind it all and deported the owner.
  On the flip side, there's a local pizza place where I currently live that's fucking terrible. Some of the worst pizza I've ever had. It made me wonder how they could stay in business. Then I found out that name of the business happened to also be the name of the local mafia family.
  
  Local places are always one or the other: either they're the best thing you've ever eaten and you can't wait to get back there and have it again, or they're just the worst. I guess that applies to mafia fronts, too.
- Sounds like the comic book origin story for Godfather's Pizza.

My town has a population of about 2,000 people. There are five dedicated car washes within a 10-mile radius of my house, with two more under construction.
- I honestly do not understand car washes and how they are supposed to turn a profit.
  
  With drug money, duh.
  Haven't you seen Breaking Bad?
  The drug trade is a trillion dollar industry. Got to wash them somewhere. Where better than at a washer?
  
  Biggest cost is the startup and then employees, with an occasional big maintenance repair. Buying cleaning products in bulk? The cost will make you feel cheated for what you pay for a quart to a gallon.

It's way more than one shop. Meh, shop there anyway if you like anything they sell. Chances are your government is blowing ridiculous money on bullshit anyway. Pay cash too when you can. And do everything you can to resist digital spending tracking.

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
  
  I’d do it, but I think I’d be worse at being a criminal.

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. 🤨
- say it's not the right time of day for donuts
  This feels like it's taken right out of a video game.

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.

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.

Only one? All vape shops are money laundering fronts, until proven otherwise.

There's a mobile phone repair shop next to where we live. Everything in the window is faded from the sun. In 6 years of living here I have not seen it open or someone inside even once.

One of our customers operates out of two leased "office" trailers next to an old pole barn in the middle of a corn field.
From there, they "operate" 17 different companies, all demanding separate billing from us.
There's no WAY it's legit. They have more "official" registered companies than they have office employees.
Edited because mobile sucks
- Could it be a landlord situation? It's pretty cheap to open an LLC. Sometimes landlords will open many of them, an LLC for every rental property they own. It protects them from liability. If something goes really wrong and a tenant sues them for big $$$, the most they risk losing is the single rental house the tenant is renting.
  
  Ironically that's one of the things they don't claim to be involved in.
  To list some of the things they claim to do
  Construction
  Hydro excavating
  "Tribal Economic Development"
  Native American health insurance
  "Health" supplements (think: "vitality" pills)
  Renewable Energy projects
  Manufacturing
  Finance
  Industrial development (though never actually heard of a won bid)
  (all of these entities are "owned" by a Native American- which I've alwas suspected is for tax benefit purposes)
  
  Won't somebody please think of the landlords?

We have a jewelry store in town that is by appointment only. During the day there's always a high end car parked at the back of the store but you never see anyone in there. When my buddy was getting ready to propose he tried calling to get an appointment and it went straight to voicemail with a message that said private clients only and then beeped. He left a message but never heard back. I've never met anyone who has seen anyone go in or come out of that place.
- No, that's just a high end jeweler
  I mean that's a kind of money laundering all in itself tho
  
  My thought too. Probably by referral only or something.
- Local Italian hotdog place that rarely open and when it does it for 1 hour only.
  
  Reminds me of a story I once read about a couple being on holiday in Italy. They went in a local pizzeria and were the only ones in there, they got pretty shady looks from everyone, but still ordered a pizza. It was the best pizza they ever had. Also, for the whole time they were there, no customer came there and it was silent.
  
  I'm interested in the by appointment only hot dog place. They are probably the greatest hotdogs ever.

At the end of my street growing up was a used car dealership with the same 4 cars scattered out front my entire time through elementary, middle and high school. They didn't even bother airing up the tires...

Not quite the same but I used to work at a local, family owned supermarket chain that is now out of business. I started at one of the busiest locations, but after I moved apartments I transferred to another location that was out in the 'burbs. At the first location I worked at, all our equipment was well maintained, stock was reasonable, stuff seemed normal.
At the suburban location, our equipment was all falling apart. The roof leaked. The other stores sent us their overstock and charged it to our departments. I was in the deli, and one day the contracted maintenance guy was there and I asked if he could take a look at one of the meat slicers. He said sorry, corporate told him not to do any work at this location that they hadn't pre-approved.
My first hypothesis was that this location didn't make any money, and that's why they didn't want to spend to fix it. One day I decided to ask the store manager about it—he was pretty chill and we talked sometimes, so I figured he wouldn't mind. I said "Does this store actually make any money?" and he said "Well, let me put it this way: the numbers I report to corporate show that every department here, except floral, makes a profit every month. And then the numbers they put out in the quarterly reports show that we've never made a profit since we opened."
"Where does the money go?" I asked.
"That's above my pay grade," he said.
I'm convinced someone was embezzling funds. A couple years after I left, the whole chain closed one day with no notice to the employees.
- That's just terrible management

There are three recently opened smoke and vape shops in my village that are 100% money laundering schemes, they all sell American sweets as well for some reason

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.
  
  Yes that's literally what money laundering is

I have long held the belief that all these mattress stores are all a front for something.
There's a shopping center nearby that has three of them. THREE MATTRESS STORES WITHIN THROWING DISTANCE OF EACH OTHER.
Mattresses are like a once every 10 years purchase. How the fuck is there enough foot traffic to support 3 of them mother fuckers that close together?
When I worked across the street from them I never saw any of them having big sales or anything. Nobody I knew anyone that worked at any of them. They never seemed busy. Never saw trucks bringing in stock.
It doesn't add up.
- A person I am close with once worked at one of those mattress stores. They get maybe 1-4 sales a day, but they have stupid high margins and pay their workers poverty wages.
  
  Yeah I can rationalize how one storeight stay open in an area, but 3 of them? With the rent in that shopping center there was no goddamn way they were paying employees and keeping the lights on.
- I know a town with I think five or six large furniture (or general household item) stores basically next to each other. Big brands.
  It is probably a combination of factors: The area is easy to reach by car, it's easy to supply by truck, plenty of space for storage and people actively come there to shop furniture - yes you will be competing with five different stores, but since the customer base travels quite a bit anyway, you'd be stupid to set up shop in a different town. People will walk/drive 5 minutes to check a different store if they already came all this way, but they probably won't head to a store two towns over just to compare prices.
- I think it's the same thing with sofa/couch shops. I have four of them at a walking distance near my place. I've never seen anybody going in.
  Also, an Italian company which I won't name is always advertising on all national TV channels. All the time. TV ads prices are insane, how can they afford them?
  In the 70s, the police made a famous mafia family "split" and move from the South of Italy to some North cities, in a futile attempt to stop their mafia activities. A branch of this family opened a mattress factory, which is now famous all over Italy. This is not speculation, it's history. I won't name this mattress factory, but if you can read Italian you can Google "mafia Budrio" to learn more.
- I have to imagine matrices are a high margin item because of how infrequently they are purchased, how they cost as much as some used cars, and how important in-person examination is. Perhaps there's some kind of vendor lock in similar to car dealerships?

My town had an extremely generically named "spa" that I passed by all the time and joked that it must be a drug ring and I found out that no actually they were a human trafficking ring and they got shut down by the police.
- Sad ending.

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

you mean the 12 car washes that all sprung up at the same exact time all within 5 miles of each other?
the same ones that have practically zero cars driving through them because they opened at the height of 2020 where nobody was driving anymore?
the same ones that somehow weathered a bust market for carwashes for 3 years?
the same ones that are owned by two guys with the same last name that look suspiciously like retired mafia?
you mean those places?
nah, they're just a couple brothers that were really successful before the pandemic.
- Carwashes are a decent choice of laundering business, but are also a business with remarkably low overhead. They are a popular choice of business for someone who wants to buy land and sit on it in a place they believe will become developed so they can sell it later. There is a large initial outlay for building the structure, but the actual machines and installation can cost less than buying a car. Upkeep is surprisingly simple and costs less than you probably think. The soaps and chemicals are dirt cheap and sold in 30-55gal quantities that last a month or more depending on traffic. The only real overhead if you aren’t getting customers is your mortgage and payroll, and you’d be paying a mortgage even if you just bought the land and did nothing with it. Not to mention touchless carwashes only require staff when there is a problem and any touch carwash can be run by a single person.
- I know of a guy that installed a drive through car wash in his driveway. Nobody goes there but it's apparently really loud when it runs and his son ran through it one time. He got pretty banged up.
  
  sounds like its broken badly. his walter bills must be loco, eh?

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.
- 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?
  
  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.
  
  This article breaks it down.
- American Candy shops in Denmark too. It's hilarious. I still go to them when I visit my bestie though haha. Love those mixed bags.
  
  Denmark
  but, but you have real chocolate in denmark.... why allow such an affront?
  
  Yep, the ones in London are American candy shops too.
  
  There was a small one that recently rebranded into a doughnut shop. If it was a front at some point, its popular enough to be legit now.
- 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 is a super famous, incredibly mediocre destination BBQ restaurant in Central Texas that is famous for an all-you-can-eat family-style meal. For decades, they only accepted cash. Way, way longer than made sense. Like into the 2020s I think.
Their main menu item was all-you-can eat (hard to quantify number of sales), only members of the family that ran the place were allowed to count the take and the receipts at the end of each shift, and they only took cash.
I fully believe they were either laundering money or evading taxes by under-reporting. But then they opened a few satellite branches, including one at the airport, and started having to be more careful as they expanded.
- There was a place here that only took cash despite being delivery and every other place here taking cards. They've started taking cards. They didn't take cards because profit margins are low and card fees are high. I asked them because I was curious.
  They might be the mafia though. It is NJ.
  
  There's a place my town that also accepts DoorDash orders and only takes cash inside, but it's a taqueria. I haven't asked why, but the food is pretty good.
- I have no idea how I went this long without knowing The Salt Lick did all you can eat family style meal, apparently it's even at the top of the menu...
  Although I'll admit my favorite parts are the mustard BBQ sauce and the hammock garden, agreed that the BBQ is meh. And having known lots of country folks, evading taxes by only taking cash sounds about right.

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.

Once lived in a small town with not one, but TWO Hollywood Videos. In like the late 20-teens. Just napkin math numbers, you'd need every household in the town to rent a video twice a week to support both of those just maintaining their leases... Over a decade into the age of streaming dominance.
There was no way they weren't doing something shady on the side.

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
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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.

In 1991 two small businesses were busted for being fronts for illegal gambling parlors. 30 Cleveland cops were part of the bust. I lived next to both of them at one time. One was a t-shirt printing shop, I forget what the other was. A year later I moved into a neighborhood that had a pizza shop with a very nice sign, no windows and never seemed to be open. It was not uncommon to see a patrol car parked in front

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.

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.

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.

YaYa's Flam Broiled Chicken. It's not good. There's never anybody in the parking lot. But you're telling me they could move to a bigger location? One that's a converted bank?? Banks have vaults. For all the laundered money.

Just one? Knowing how expensive commercial rent is in this area, I’m pretty sure quite a few of the stores around here are fronts. No way this town supports 12 different nail salons. There’s a taco shop and a greek place in the same shopping center that both taste terrible and are always completely empty. How does a vacuum and sewing repair shop stay in business in this day and age?
- Lots of people are having their stuff repaired instead of disposing and buying new. Those tailors custom fit your clothes, do embroidery and patching, in addition to repairs. Shoe repair shops will restore leather, resole boots, and give them all a good shine. I've never had a vacuum repaired, but they're pricey enough that I'd definitely try repair before buying a new one. Check out your local repair shops. They probably do good work, because they get a lot more practice than you might think.
- How does a vacuum and sewing repair shop stay in business in this day and age?
  Commercial repairs, probably.
- When i see rent in some places i always have to do some math to figure out how much money they have to make to pay rent and one or two salaries. And i often don't get it. There is an old town that is kinda nice, but not that much foot traffic, and rent is insane because it's in the middle of an old town. Many stores and restaurants open and then close again, because they go under. But there is a computer store that is open as long as i can remember. And not like a cool hacker, i'll sell you an rtx 5090 shop, a shop that still has a y2k sticker on the window and they still sell you McAfee for your pc. Absolutely bizzare

😎 current U.S. presidential administration 😎
- That one is easy to prove.

I grew up near a place called the "McGuffin Lumber Company." It was just a tiny storefront business, and I never saw anyone go in. And, of course, "MacGuffin" is a Hollywood term for an arbitrary thing that motivates the plot of a movie, like the Maltese Falcon in that film. So it was a running gag in my family that it must be a front.

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.
- I'll be mildly shocked if this isn't in Australia.
  
  Ya spot on mate!

There's a psychic/tarot reader on the highway near me that's been around as long as I can remember, and I don't think I've ever seen a car parked out front.
- No no that's a failed cult. Quite different.
  
  A failed cult would actually fail at some point, as in run out of money and lose the property.
  These guys? Nope. I'm not sure a nuclear holocaust would uproot them at this point.
- It's pretty clever if it is a money laundering front actually because a "business" like that doesn't really do anything that generates much paperwork and can claim it charged imaginary customers any amount it wants without having to justify it.

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.

There is an "unlicensed" car repair shop in my town. They always service upper-price class, new-looking cars with license plates from far away. Never actually seen anyone working on them, but the suit wearers that collect the cars always seem happy. Not fishy at all, no need to investigate.

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.

Bakery across from prisoners rights office I used to volunteer at. Went to get a loaf to make a sandwich once. Open shelving all around, mostly bare except for a few dusty loaves. Ask this big, very white man with a head like a four-slice toaster, for said loaf and he goes in the back and comes out with a bag of Wonderbread rofl.

There's multiple tiny Mexican restaurants in my town that I 100% know are run by the cartel. Like,I know the manager didn't buy a $100k dodge Durango hellcat selling burritos and tacos in a farm town.
I don't fucking care though, the tacos are good.

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. :(

I knew a guy who drove a taxi for a company in New York back in the 70s and one day he got in a wreck and totaled his cab, and a very large very Italian man came and told him not to worry about it and that everything would be handled and there was no need for paperwork, and that was the end of it.

One pizza place by my old house in the bad part of Minneapolis always had a bunch of cars in the parking lot. One day I decide to try it; I manage to find a parking spot, walk in, and the place is pretty much empty. I order a pizza, take it home, and it's one of the worst pizzas I've ever eaten. That place simply cannot be a legitimate business.
- Had some friends who love to try out new places to eat. They pulled into a standard country pub on a roadtrip, nothing unusual about it to make it seem any different to any country Aussie pub. They ordered a standard pub lunch. The big hairy dude behind the bar grumbled at them and then went out to the kitchen. 20 minutes later they are served the worst meal of their lives and 5 minutes after that a large amount of motorcycles pulls into the parking lot.
  They left soon after. The place was a biker gang front and all the locals knew to avoid it.
  On a related note, there's a $2 junk shop in my town where you can sit at the bus stop out front in the morning and watch every tweaker in town walk in, spend 2 mins inside, and then walk out looking much happier, 10 seconds later, carrying nothing.
  It is so obviously an over-the-counter methamphetamine dealership that the entire bus stop is known as 'Meth Corner' to everyone in town.
- Note to self: stick to the Little Caesars, if it's the neighborhood I think you're referring to.

There’s a Mexican restaurant which I always wanted to try. Walked in and ordered a carne asada plate- the fucking thing was almost 30 bucks. It took like 20 minutes and was the consistency of reconstituted shoe leather and tasted like a jarred fart.
There is never a soul eating in there and yet it remains open.
SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER
- Oof, if you're going to run a money laundering business at least either provide a good product or a cheap price.
  
  They don't want to do that because the restaurant could potentially become popular and then they'd have to actually function as a restaurant.

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.

There is a trading card shop here - in a village of 2500.
How?
- 4 magic players and 2 40k players should do it
  
  Matter of fact, who needs the Magic players?
- I knew a local trading card shop that was basically daycare for a high functioning autistic nepo baby
  His rich parents 1) wanted to get his collection out of the house, 2) wanted HIM out of the house for at least part of the day, and 3) Figured the business losses as the cost of 'daycare', so the store never made money but it served a purpose
  Used to clean up on locals there, you'd be surprised how much money you can make at card tournaments
- Idk if 10% of the town patronizes it regularly and there's no other shops around that's like 250 customers coming in year round, let's say each spends an average of 150 in a year that's what .... 37 grand? Plus whatever online retail they can do.
  If it's just like one dude that runs it and works there and pays themselves I could see it being viable.
  Edit: probably would be a good way to launder some drug money though and I've found a lot of weed smokers in the mix of my nerd shops I frequent.

We were excited to learn of a new restaurant opening, an all-day breakfast and lunch place, like an upscale Denny's with a liquor license.
Hmm. That sounds more ghetto than summer lazy patio time with friends should.
Anyway, they finished setting up 4 years ago. At most I see 2 cars in the lot on the way past and no one seems to ever be inside.
Either they're laundering serious cash or they're somehow bankrupting a restaurant in an area that needs an option other than pizza and subway.
- ...have you ever gone?

I know this great money laundering scheme in town. You take filthy money and they turn it into clean tamales. Abuelita has the slickest game in the county

JP Morgan Chase, Comerica, Bank of America, etc

There's a falafel place that closes at around 13:00 every day and doesn't seem to really care all that much if you pay or not. I can't imagine it not being a money laundering scheme.
They make great falafel though!

"La casa de las carcasas". All Spaniards know it.
- 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.
- 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.