When I was in LA the “medical marijuana” thing was at its height, in the years I was in the system the cost of a doctor’s certification went from $200 to maybe $40, any time ANY commercial storefront cleared out it would be immediately reborn as a dispensary, ‘cause those guys could pay rent.

The dispensaries were actually kinda nice because it was a weirdly old-tyme shopping experience - you’d walk into this store dedicated to a single product, the clerk would recognize you, discuss the wares on offer, maybe ask what you were looking for and recommend something, offer it up for inspection, then you’d get bulk goods scooped and weighed out of large bins, the clerk would maybe flirt with you which was something between charming and awkward depending on the clerk, but you’d put up with it in hopes of encouraging them to throw in some free product or other treat which they often would, you’d wave goodbye and the next person in line would come up.

The only thing like that I can remember was this fishmonger my mother would take me along to as a kid, I remember he kept promising that if I came in when he had live crabs he’d take one out and show me how they walk sideways, eventually I did so he did.

There was also this seafood restaurant near a ballfield I played little league on that we’d go to afterwards. Eventually, which is to say like years later, far closer to now, I took in architecture and banged it against geography and history and realized that that whole area was probably a heavily “white ethnic” working class suburb back before Vatican II, when it was still a Catholic thing to not eat meat on Fridays (and so usually eat fish instead, which didn’t count as meat because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

And both these places easily looked like they might date to before the mid-60s, so I wonder how much that accounts for their existence, and how many similar enterprises went under as they started to lose the Friday trade.

Actually, if the fish-based dining industry took a hit from that, I wonder if the later rise of sushi wasn’t just a cover for the return of seafood restaurants.