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"Spatula City! We Sell Spatulas... And That's All!"
—UHF
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A Severely Specialized Store is a retail outlet that only deals with an incredibly narrow product range, typically one or two items of a very specific type. As this trope is almost always invoked due to Rule of Funny, the store's products will be exactly what the protagonists need in their moment of crisis. How such a business manages to stay in operation, or why the heroes can't just go to a general-purpose merchant, is never raised.
Also see Crippling Overspecialization, The Magazine Rule. Contrast We Sell Everything.
Examples:
Film[]
- UHF features a commercial for "Spatula City".
- Freaked has the massive conglomerate Everything Except Shoes. The Big Bad eventually mutates the CEO into a massive tennis shoe just to screw with him.
Literature[]
- This is a recurring joke in some of Robert Munsch's children's books. "Zoom!" starts with the protagonists visiting a wheelchair store (an obvious Expy of a car dealership), while "Smelly Socks" includes a trip to the city's socks store, which is so large it can be seen from the river.
- Captain Underpants: Inverted in Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman: To help Captain Underpants regain his powers, George and Harold need to get some fabric softener to counteract the spray starch that took them away. They run to a new store that opened nearby, which turns out to be "Everything BUT Fabric Softener."
- Mr. Ollivander of Harry Potter sells wands. Just — wands. Justified as each wand must fit its owner, much like a shoe or clothing store.
- The Discworld novel Going Postal has Dave's Pin Exchange, which sells only pins (pin collecting serving as a parody of stamp collecting), with the owner being very adamant that he doesn't sell nails.
- Douglas Adams' non-fiction book Last Chance To See recounts his befuddled trip through several of these.
Live Action TV[]
- In an episode of Northern Exposure, Shelly is interested in going to the Mall of America; she mentions that they have a whole store that's just socks. (This is true in Real Life. It's called "Just Socks.")
- A variation appears in a skit from All That, with a retail store that sells only a single pair of pants.
- On Roundhouse, two Amazingly Embarrassing Parents look for envelopes at the mall. The map indicates a store named "Gee, I Can't Believe There's a Store in This Mall That Sells Nothing But Envelopes, Can You?".
- Saturday Night Live had sketches about a store that sells only Scotch tape.
- Pixelface has an episode where the other characters enter Clairparker's game to do some shopping at the mall. Riley and Romford are looking for sausages and a remote control, respectively. They find everything they are after at a store called 'Sausages n' Remote Controls'.
Video Games[]
- A common staple of roleplaying games where a store sells magic spells or gear so ridiculously powerful that only a very rich legendary hero could buy or use them.
- In The Legend of Zelda series, stores that sell more than three or four items are a rarity (and most stores have at least one exclusive item). Parodied on Cracked with a photomanipulation of a Real Life storefront: "I Sell Three Things (And That's It)". Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games
Web Comics[]
- This is a recurring gag in Axe Cop. Need an awesome ramp to drive to the moon? Go to the awesome ramp store. Unicorn horn? Can be found at the unicorn horn store.
Western Animation[]
- In Megas XLR, Coop or the Monster of the Week often demolish bizarrely (and hilariously) specialized buildings during the fight. The implication generally being that they're unneeded and thus conveniently empty.
- In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode "Owl's Well That Ends Well", Spike needs to get a quill for Twilight. So of course, he goes to Quills and Sofas ... which just so happens to be out of the former.
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Spike: But the store is called Quills and Sofas! You only sell two things! |
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- In Jimmy Neutron, Retroville has stores like Cheese World, Mime World, and Rug World. Rug World actually had something Jimmy needed to defeat the evil pants.
- This was a common gag on Tom Goes to the Mayor. Tom opened a store called "Big Cups", which only sold big cups. There was also a store that just sold bear traps.
- Ned Flanders of The Simpsons opened up and maintained a "Leftorium" store for left-handed products for left-handed people. It was initially a bust, until Homer Simpson started feeling bad and scrounged up as many left-handed customers as he could.