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!
“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.
Beauty salons. Too many of them. Who is even visiting them?
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.
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
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
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.
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?
Mixue. They’re suddenly just popping up everywhere, and the price of their ice cream/drinks is dirt cheap to a point where it doesn’t even make any sense. I understand that the cost of those ingredients are dirt cheap anyway, but there’s no way their margins cover operations, rent, labor.
Multinational chain? More likely that they’re dumping to drive out local competition.
I had go look up mixue and I now crave ice cream and tea. The hot and cold combo must be amazing. Possibly the cure to brain freeze.
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Used to live in a street with 7 barber shops, in a town known for drugs smuggling. It was safe to walk there at night though surpisingly.
😎 current U.S. presidential administration 😎
That one is easy to prove.
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.
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!
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.
Look if the mattress store is out of business, why do I always see lights on inside after 8:30 PM?
