Unique and Unusual Stores Across America

Paint Bank General Store layers practical country retail with a Christmas shop, wildlife displays, the Swinging Bridge restaurant and a real walkable bridge indoors.

Paxton Gate combines the living and the preserved, filling its Valencia Street shop with plants and garden goods alongside taxidermy, entomology, fossils, minerals, bones, jewelry, home décor, art, and other objects drawn from the natural world.

Pendleton Mill Store connects substantial wool-goods retail directly to the active historic mill behind it.

Pink Elephant Antique Mall turns a Route 66 antiques stop into a full roadside compound of giant fiberglass figures, dozens of dealers, homemade fudge and candy, an ice-cream-cone diner and increasingly strange seasonal events.

Possum Emporium combines an indoor vendor market of antiques, vintage goods, handmade crafts, décor, collectibles, instruments, and curiosities with an outdoor produce and pop-up-vendor setup in a converted church outside Mentone.

Presidential Pawn blurs the line between museum case and sales case by combining an active pawn shop, specialty clock operation and free curiosity museum.

Rabbit Hash General Store remains a real community store and gathering place, carrying food staples, Kentucky-made household goods, antiques, collectibles, apparel and souvenirs inside its carefully reconstructed landmark building.

Ratsy’s combines vintage and recycled clothing, strange gifts, odd socks, retro accessories, curiosities, handmade jewelry, old objects, and deliberately bizarre craft pieces.

Replacements, Ltd. turns an enormous specialist inventory of tableware and collectibles into a public showroom with design displays, museum pieces, restoration services and guided tours.

Rockin' Rudy's behaves less like a record shop with gifts than an alternative department store whose departments seem to have been selected by curiosity rather than conventional retail logic.

Rocky Mountain Punk Nature Art & Oddities combines an artist collective and handmade nature-art studio with a plant shop, record bin, vintage store, crystal-and-jewelry counter, antique shelf, and oddities cabinet.

Roosevelt Tower stretches thrift shopping across an old factory property, mixing antiques and salvage with records, machines, motorcycles, taxidermy, toys, militaria, electronics, signage, collectibles, and oversized objects backed by a huge warehouse.