Where I live, there is a chain of "vacuum repair" shops. There are like 4 - 5 of them in an area no bigger than 60 square miles. I've always assumed they were a money laundering front. Are that many people repairing their vacuums?
There are a glut of hyper-specialized businesses around here. Russians run all of the appliance repair shops. Israelis ran all cell phone repair places until COVID (now we have few at all). These all took digital payments.
Iranians/Turks around here run a bunch of rug shops that never get any customers yet linger for decades. I don't know a single person that owns a rug.
The Chinese run donut shops that are cash only, never see any foot traffic, sell terrible stale donuts, and don't even have seating. Vietnamese run all the nail salons and both change owners and personnel every few years.
Disney race-swaps protagonists of old movies that predictably flop instead of creating the next Frozen, and Concord burned $400m on a game that only 25k people wanted ($1m revenue). How is this sustainable?
It could be money laundering, but some of these businesses look like they're intended to fail. I'd sooner suspect some other financial engineering going on. H1-B fraud or SBA loans-for-foreigners schemes.
(from Breaking Bad)