Basic Trope: The easiest way to know what a store sells is by looking at the appearance of it.
- Straight: A pizza restaurant has a billboard shaped like a giant pizza.
- Exaggerated:
- A convenience store has pictures of everything they sell painted on the walls and sculpted on the billboard. They even have statues of groceries.
- The entire building is shaped like pizza.
- Downplayed: A bakery has a small board with the picture of a loaf of bread on it.
- Justified: The clientèle is mostly illiterate.
- Inverted: A restaurant shaped like a giant pizza... sells seafood. They couldn't afford to renovate what the previous owner had done.
- Subverted:
- The owners planned to make a billboard of what they sell, but they decided it would cost too much money, and it would be cheaper to send brochures.
- The building resembles a product that isn't offered there.
- Double Subverted:
- Then again, they did have more than enough money to send brochures and make a billboard.
- But later, they start selling the item the building resembles due to popular demand.
- Parodied:
- A running gag has everything shaped like what it sells. This results in incredibly impractical buildings like a needle shaped sewing store that is only two feet wide and sixty feet deep.
- A novelty restaurant goes out of business, and the new one that takes over the site has to bankrupt itself renovating the facade to resemble what they sell.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: The store isn't shaped like what it sells at all, just a regular building.
- Enforced: The creators want the kind of businesses that operate in town to be immediately obvious from a shot of the street.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: The manager thinks the sight of a pizza will make people want a pizza.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: "I'm not making my restaurant look like a giant pizza, I want this to be a classy Italian restaurant, not some novelty shop!"
- Discussed: "Why do we always seem to find a place, any place shaped like anything they sell every five kilometers?"
- Conversed: "That restaurant Alice is going to sure looks like a pizza. It must be a pizza restaurant!"
Back to Shaped Like What It Sells
