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
Bizarchitecture.
Examples:
Comic Books
Live-Action Television
- 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.
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 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. This wiki breaks on URLs with apostrophes in them, so you'll just have to Google it.
- Here's a music building.
