Business front

You've walked by a restaurant a few times and you've never seen anyone in it. But the menu looks good, the place is clean, and it looks like they've spent a fair amount of money making the place look nice. You wonder how long they could stay in business without customers. So you take a chance.

Your food comes, and it seems decent enough, but your order is wrong. The woman who seated you is counting receipts, but it seems odd there could be so many receipts when there have been no customers. Her appearance is such that you imagine she might have been in the world's oldest profession before getting into the restaurant business. A second woman says she will correct your order, and explains that there's a new cook. Does this mean they have had more than one cook and yet you've never seen a customer there? Things start seeming a bit more odd, and the second woman also seems that she has potentially worked in the world's oldest profession.

Your order is corrected, the food is ok, but as you are getting ready to pay, at the counter one woman is berating another for having not cleaned the toilets. The woman being berated has limited English, and is trying to clarify the multitude of tasks she's been ordered to perform. They are not kind to her. You begin to suspect that maybe the primary business of this restaurant is not serving food, but perhaps a front for human trafficking or money laundering. Yeah - I have a vivid imagination. And there are a lot of odd store fronts in the Sydney suburbs - businesses that never seem to have any customers, but somehow keep the lights on.