The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday - Television Tropes & Idioms

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alt title(s): The Little Shop That Wasnt There Yesterday

Marge: Eugh! Homer, where did you get that thing?

Homer: From that little shop right over —(Points to an empty lot, where sand devils whirl. He gasps in disbelief, then corrects himself.) Oh, wait, no, it was right over there.

Shop Vendor: (waving) You'll be sorrrrrrry!

— The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror II, The Monkey's Paw

You know the place. It was a vacant lot when you went by this time yesterday. It'll probably be a vacant lot again this time tomorrow. But right now, there's a shop there that looks like it came out of Charles Dickens — or maybe HP Lovecraft. And if you go inside, you'll find a quirky old shopkeeper who has any number of potentially magical — and potentially inconvenient — artifacts available for sale. Cheap. Today only. Just for you.

Just don't expect a liberal returns policy.

Originally a literary device from the surge of weird fantasy writing in the 1920s and earlier — H.G. Wells used it in The Crystal Egg (1897) and The Magic Shop (1903) — The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday still turns up occasionally, sometimes because of bad writing, and sometimes because of extremely clever writing.

Compare Bazaar Of The Bizarre, Big Store, Inn Between The Worlds, Recurring Traveller, and Traveling Landmass.

Examples

Anime and Manga

An accidental, curious stopover at a store of this type sets up the entire plot of Video Girl Ai.
- And, later in the story, the Store Clerk at Gokuraku Video rebels against their cynical intentions, and opens a rival Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday, Neo Gokuraku, whose goal is to find and protect the pure hearted before Gokuraku Video can screw them up.
In one of the Ranma 1/2 stories, Kuno purchases a phoenix egg from such a shop.
- Akane went to a similar shop and got a recipe and ingredients for a magical snack food (but she messed up the recipe and it tasted awful along with doing the exact opposite of what it intended).
  - In the anime, a number of mobile versions of these show up — to be precise, traveling salesmen who sell magical stuff. There's also an anime-exclusive antique store with a haunted bra (the owner of which asks them to guard it from the underwear thief), and Ryoga in the manga has a weird knack for stumbling across magical stores.
The villains in the first season of Sailor Moon opened a series of these shops as fronts to steal the Life Energy that they needed from ordinary humans.
- Also used by the villains in the second arc of the second season.
  - Not to forget, Palla Palla had a Dentist Clinic That Wasn't There Yesterday in an episode.
This is the type of store Yuuko the Dimension Witch runs in XXXholic, although it deviates slightly from the norm in that it actually will be there tomorrow. The key to being able to see and enter it, however, is that you must have need of Yuuko's wish-granting powers. Presumably this is very convenient for dealing with encyclopedia salesmen. She does eventually say that the shop was built specifically for Syaoran and Sakura-hime of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle.
One of these traps Sasami in an episode of Tenchi In Tokyo. (Although, neither she nor Tenchi had ever been in the area before, so nobody knew that the shop was magical.)
In ARIA, Akari winds up in a cafe that is usually only open to cats. Sure enough, when she walks out it appears to have been long abandoned.
The titular pet shop in Pet Shop Of Horrors tends to stay in one place a bit longer than most of the listed examples, but still has the ability to vanish mysteriously overnight, and fits the trope precisely in most other ways.
The camera shop the main characters in Kamen Rider Decade brings them to different dimensions and even goes so far as to create new identities for them. It is also implied to give them talents required for those identities. When Tsukasa became a detective he gained great deductive reasoning and in one universe he gained great talent in playing the violin.
- He might have actually had those skills to start with and just never used them.
Chapter 2 of the Read of Dream manga features a library that wasn't there yesterday. It only appears once every ten years, and you can only take out one book at a time. But when you die you can spend eternity reading what seems to be every book in this and any other world. Just so long as you return every book you borrow.
Kaede gets the coffee mug that starts off the whole Wagamama Fairy * Mirumo de Pon! series, but only in the anime. In the manga, her mother gives it to her as a souvenir from her recent trip.

Comic Books

Subverted in the 90's version of DC's Starman. Jack (Starman, on the run from the Bad Guys) ducks into an alley and discovers a fortune teller's shop that he's never seen before. He thinks it's something like this trope... until the fortune teller explains that she's been there for a few months, and there's nothing mysterious about Jack not noticing.

Fanfic

One of Those Shops is an experimental branching Round Robin writing project whose premise involves the main character ending up as the owner of a Little Shop.
Googling "Spells R Us" yields a huge number of stories that fit this trope but have male characters getting objects that turn them into girls.

Film

Ostensibly, this is where Gizmo the Mogwai was purchased in the first Gremlins movie.
From Beyond the Grave, a 1973 episodic horror film from Amicus "I want to be Hammer" Productions, similar in structure to the more popular Dr. Terror. The shop keeper (Peter Cushing) sells cursed antiques to four different customers, all of whom end dead before they could return them. Okay, one of them survives; I won't say whom. In the final scene, Cushing breaks the fourth wall and attempts to sell something to the audience; the camera escapes and the shop door closes.

Literature

Terry Pratchett did this once or twice in his Discworld novels. In The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic, Twoflower the tourist has an ill-tempered, sentient piece of luggage that he bought in one of these tavernes vagrantes, or "mysterious wandering shops" (he asked for "traveling luggage" and got Exactly What It Says On The Tin), and the characters actually enter such a shop in the latter book. In Soul Music, a mysterious little shop that was always there (but wasn't always there yesterday) is actually still there the next day. When two of the characters comment on this (and one insists the shop was on the other side of the street last time), after they leave, the strange old woman who runs the shop says, "I'll forget my own head next," and pulls a lever... at which point the shop moves across the street.
- The books put forth several different theories to explain these shops. For example, there once existed a universe of merchants which has long since experienced heat death. However, the inhabitants developed technology to travel between universes and have been selling random stuff ever since. Eventually, it turns out that the actual explanation has to do with a shopkeeper who was cursed by a wizard (well, it says "sorcerer," but probably doesn't mean it) after the wizard had an unpleasant retail experience.
- The shop from Soul Music on the other hand had no clear origin, but it sells musical instruments of legendary power. It's implied that the guitar that Buddy bought used to belong to the Creator.
Subject of the novel Needful Things by Stephen King. Lightly subverted in that the little shop was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow: it's run as a perfectly normal small town curio store, complete with "coming soon" signs before the grand opening and regular business hours. Less suspicious that way.
Poul Anderson used the Golden Phoenix tavern in his fantasy stories, notably Midsummer Tempest (set in a parallel history where everything Shakespeare wrote is truth). At one point, Nicholas van Rijn, an SF hero of Anderson's, has a cameo.
This is the entire premise for the Magic Shop series of books by Bruce Coville, where children buy powerful magical relics from a magical shop like this, usually ones that teach them An Aesop.
- The first such book, The Monster's Ring, has a kid purchasing a ring that could turn him into a monster, but with certain rules attached.
- Another such book, Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, has the title character buying a dragon's egg from the magic shop, which he then finds out he has to hatch. (Actually, the egg chose him. Dragons apparently have the power to attract their own prenatal egg-sitters.)
- Another one, Jennifer Murdley's Toad, in which a girl enters the shop and ends up buying a pet toad. The shop owner didn't warn her that said toad was not only a smartass, it also had a bounty on its head — or more accurately, in its head.
The titular establishment of Star Trek's The Captain's Table series can appear anywhere, at any time, where a qualified customer (The captain of any vessel) is, and vanishes just as easily.
The Goosebumps series contained several books about "The Haunted Mask", in which the titular mask was always purchased from the Little Shop (which had conveniently closed when the unhappy owner attempted to return.)
- The shop makes a brief return in The Scream of the Haunted Mask, where we learn that it had previously vanished entirely, leaving behind an empty plot of land.
- Literally, in several endings in "The Little Comic Shop of Horrors"
This and several other tropes are subverted in The Little Magic Shop, by Bruce Sterling. In the early 19th Century, a young man stumbles on a little shop in New York. The proprietor, Mr. O'Beronne, presses on him several magic items, finally persuading him to buy a bottle of youth potion in exchange for all he possesses. "Really? How much for two bottles?" They strike a bargain: Whenever the man comes back he can buy another bottle on the same terms. This doubly frustrates the shop owner: He has to stay put and keep his shop in business (changing it with the times), and his customer stubbornly refuses to learn the obvious Aesop about the futility of unnaturally prolonged life. Despite all this there is a happy ending for both.
The shop from which Cassie, of The Haunting Hour Volume One: Don't Think About It, purchased the book from was located down an alley, changed its room layout to prevent her from leaving until she made the intended purchase, and disappeared soon after. The owner did stick around long enough to give them a cryptic (and by "cryptic", I mean "reasonably obvious") clue as to how to deal with the thing that had been unleashed. And to remind her that she had broken the first rule of the book...
In the book The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones, a funny old man sells strange science kits that do magical things. He also sells bright pink footballs. At the end of the story, his shop has vanished — or more accurately, been bulldozed.
Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny's Psychoshop is a pawnshop, accessible from apparently any time period or place in the galaxy, "where you can dump any unwanted aspect of your spirit as long as you exchange it for something else". And, oh yeah — all exchanges are final. The Psychoshop is actually a lot more benign than this trope usually is, though.
Find a Transformation fetishism story that isn't the result of a)mad science/interfering gods b)some variation of The Virus, or c)someone buying something from a mysterious little shop. I'll wait. This troper has seen stories in the same genre from the 90s, and has noted that the leads these days tends to buy the item from a mysterious website someone recommended to them. Strangely, this is exactly the way a lot of geeks get their porn. Or So I Heard. They're presumably inspired by the "Spells R' Us" series mentioned above.
The Store, a novel by Bentley Little. A nice little patch of land turns up bulldozed one day. Despite a dead guy under some knocked-over trees, the titular store is built and all kinds of horrors, mundane and supernatural happen. Anything can be bought, if you ask the right questions. From the oddly possible, powerful firecrackers for a nickel, to the insanely impossible, such as a video game called 'N***gerKill' (not censored) . Eventually the whole place goes cockeyed, the villains seemingly defeated but...a small farmer's market several hundred miles away terrifies a traveling couple.
The 1915 Lord Dunsany short story The Bureau d'Echange de Maux features a little shop in Paris where men may exchange whatever "evil" or burden they feel they have for twenty francs. Once a trade is made, a client will never find the Bureau again.
Appears in the short science fiction story Doodad by Ray Bradbury, in which a man on the run from The Mafia or equivalent helps a man who turns out to be a shopkeeper of such a shop: it sells "gadgets, gimmicks, doodads, doohingeys" and so on, which are composite imaginary tools capable of doing anything that any item ever described by that name can do.
The titular shops of The weapons Shops of Isher by A. E. Van Vogt. In fact there's a whole chain of them throughout the Empire of the title.
The Shop of the Aether and Neither, from The Day of the Dissonance, is located in a town that can't be found unless it's really needed. After shoppers have departed, it promptly vanishes and takes the village with it, making it The Little Brigadoon That Wasn't There Yesterday.
A sort of science-fiction variation on the theme was taken in ''Impossible Dreams'' by Tim Pratt, in which a Movie buff discovers a Video/DVD store in another reality where differing history has led to different movies (The Magnificent Ambersons is available in its uncut form, but Citizen Kane is a lost film, there was only one Indiana Jones movie and it starred Tom Selleck, there is a big-time actress who doesn't exist in our world, etc.); in an interesting subversion, everything he can get out of the store is useless due to interdimensional regional DVD differences and such. Oh, and only nickels are legal currency in both worlds.
In the novel Tattoo by Jennifer Barnes, Bailey, Delia, Annabelle, and Zo go to a variant of this, a Cart In The Mall That Wasn't There Yesterday. An old woman is selling temporary tattoos. These tattoos give each of them a different power. It is revealed that the old lady was the goddess of the sea, trying to get Bailey to realize that she is The Chosen One.
Another science fiction example, from Jack Williamson's novelette With Folded Hands; the protagonist of the story (a dealer in ordinary, garden-variety, non-enslaving-the-human-race-for-our-own-good robots) is walking home one day and finds a new competitor has sprung up overnight, a robot store run by the Humanoids.

Live Action TV

Sardo's Magic Mansion from Are You Afraid Of The Dark was a recurring setting in several episodes.
- Also appeared in a Deal With The Devil episode, where the more magic stuff a girl bought from the owner, the uglier she became.
- The toy factory in "The Thirteenth Floor".
The Little Shop showed up — played lightly for laughs — in Tales From the Dark Side's teleplay of Harlan Ellison's short story "Djinn, No Chaser".
It also showed up in a Christmas Episode of Punky Brewster.
Not so much a shop as potential employer in Malcolm In The Middle. After eavesdropping on a coworker's phone interview, Hal took off to a building he'd never been to before for a new job. He'd never remembered it being there before. He went through a lot of weird trials and tests as part of the interview (say, spy-type stuff), and when he decided against the job...the entire building was gone the next day.

Video Games

Throughout the Persona series, there's a place called the Velvet Room. The long-nosed man who runs it, Igor, can fuse Personae together for you. Only the main character can even see its door, and it appears in the strangest places, such as under the stairs of a karaoke bar, or in the back of a limo.

Web Comics

The Little Shop made an appearance in an early 2006 installment of the webcomic Sluggy Freelance, in a flashback to the day Torg purchased Bun-Bun.
Parodied in El Goonish Shive in the 'Goonmanji' Side Story.
HERO does not have any little shops that weren't there yesterday. However, it does have an enormous oceanic base-on-stilts that wasn't there two seconds ago.
MSF High: Subverted: While Donovan's sword is said to be an ancient artifact wielded by a destined hero bought at one of these, it was revealed to be made by the Magic Teacher, who runs her own company!

Western Animation

The Simpsons, of course, parodies this in one of its Halloween episodes. Homer buys a cursed Monkey Paw from a mysterious vendor, leaves, and is asked by Marge where he got it from.
Homer: Why, at that little shop right over... there? (points at empty lot) Oh, no, wait, it was over there. (shifts a little to the left, revealing the shop)
Shopkeeper: You'll be sorry!
- But it comes with a free frogurt!
  - That's good!
  - The frogurt is also cursed!
  - That's bad.
  - But it comes with a choice of toppings!
  - That's good!
  - The toppings contain potassium-benzoate.
  - ?
  - That's bad.
  - ...Can I go now?
The pilot of Clerks The Animated Series has both the Towering Skyscraper That Wasn't There Yesterday ("That's new.") and The Glossy Shopping Mall That Wasn't There Yesterday ("I find it hard to believe no one noticed that either."). The Skyscraper remains, but the Mall soon disappears... less because of magic, and more because Jay and Silent Bob blow it up.