Shaped Like What It Sells

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Go ahead and guess what it sells...

Sometimes the easiest way to tell what a store sells is by looking at the shape of the store itself. Like a library shaped like a stack of books or a Burger Shack that's a giant burger, Shaped Like What It Sells is a building that is modeled and designed to look like the product(s) that's inside of it.

Should a giant entity mistake it for the real deal, This Billboard Needs Some Salt will likely ensue.

A Subtrope of Bizarrchitecture.

Examples of Shaped Like What It Sells include:

Anime and Manga

  • Several buildings on the small planet of Phantasmagoria are built with this trope on mind. The Café is shaped like a coffee pot, and there are a bread factory and surrounding town that go beyond being bread-shaped, they are also made of actual bread.

Comic Books

Live-Action TV

  • The Pie Hole of Pushing Daisies is shaped like a giant pie.
  • There was a joke along these lines in one episode of How I Met Your Mother. Ted was designing a building shaped like a 10-gallon hat for some cheesy Texan franchise. Instead, they went with a Mecha-Godzilla shaped building. No businessman is going to have a building design that needlessly complex if he's not going to sell souvenirs inside...unless, of course, he's been charmed by the powers of Sven.
  • Arrested Development: The Bluths' one consistent moneymaker is the frozen banana stand, which is shaped like a banana.
  • The Brady Bunch: A client, Beebee Gallini, freaks Mike out when she asks him to design her makeup factory first in the shape of a powder puff, then a lipstick, and finally a compact, complete with hinged roof.
  • Clarissa Explains It All: Marshall Darling is an architect who seems to specialize in these.
  • My Name Is Earl: Pop's Hot Dog Cart in "Stole P's HD Cart."

Western Animation

  • The balcony of the pizzeria from Teen Titans is shaped like a slice of pizza when seen from above. The floor is the cheese and the tables are the pepperoni.
  • In Pinocchio some of the buildings in Pleasure Island, including a smoking house shaped like a pipe and a pool hall in the form of an eight-ball.
  • Used in CatDog, in the case of bodily parts.
    • As well as food, such as Taco Depot.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants has a few:
    • Glove World is made of many different buildings shaped like gloves.
    • The Chum Bucket is in the shape of a giant bucket.
  • Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius has McSpankey's Burgers, shaped like a giant burger (though it also has a giant Scotsman's head on the side).

Video Games

  • Rollercoaster Tycoon has several:
    • A lemonade stand shaped like a lemon.
    • A burger stand shaped like a cheeseburger.
    • Almost every concession stand has an option to be shaped like the things it sells.
  • Theme Park has the Coffee Shop, Pokey Cola, Big Time Fries and the Big Time Burger shops.
  • Banjo Tooie has Big Al's Burgers and Salty Joe's Fries, a hamburger stand and french fry stand shaped like their respective products.
  • The "Faultline" zone of City of Heroes, after its revamp, included a donut shop with a giant donut on top, inspired by the real-world Randy's Donuts (see below).

Web Original

  • The main shops of Neopets are themed like this: The food shop is a hamburger, the book shop is a book, the auction house is a mallet, the post office is a postal parcel, the pizza shop is a pizza, the school supply shop is a pencil, the music shop is a tuba of sorts, health food shop is broccoli, the defence item shop is a helmet, the gift shop is a gift box, the bakery is a peppercake house, the collectible card shop is a cardhouse, the hot dog shop is a hot dog, and the chocolate factory has chocolate topping.

Real Life

  • The patio walk-up to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland is shaped like a giant record player.
  • The Oscar Mayer Wiener-Mobile (shown above) is shaped like a giant wiener.
  • The headquarters of the Longaberger basket company is shaped like a giant basket.
  • Tail o' the Pup in Los Angeles and Coney Island Hot Dog Stand in Bailey, Colorado are both shaped like hot dogs.
  • Here's a music building.
  • The central part of this building in South Plainfield, NJ, which houses a company that makes boxes and other packaging materials.
  • In a borderline case, the original Hard Rock Cafe at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida (now long gone and replaced by a much larger complex) sat upon a raised platform shaped like a guitar (complete with a long neck stretching out into the parking lot). The walls of the restaurant itself followed the shape of the guitar's box.
  • You've Seen It a Million Times on TV and movies: Randy's Donuts, the place with the giant donut on top.
  • Averted by Lucy the Elephant in Margate, NJ. Over this elephant-shaped building's nearly century-and-a-half lifespan it has been (among other things) a restaurant, a tavern, a hotel and a real estate office, but has never been the site of an elephant dealership.
  • Gibeau Orange Julep in Montreal operates out of a three-storey orange.
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