The bubble tea shop near me seems legitimate, you get loads of teenagers and Chinese students in there, they are really friendly and their products are good and high quality.

Where I am it's barbers, there are so many of them. I started going to one in lockdown as I had a big beard for the 1st time ever and it's nice to get someone else to trim it. He's a single guy from Iraq (even though it says Turkish barber outside). Very articulate and friendly. Unless he's from a wealthy family I can't see how he could get the money to come over and set up a fancy shop, pretty sure he's come over as an asylum seeker. I'm guessing he has been offered cheap rent for a short time, but he's still had a big outlay to set up the shop. He seems to do ok, but many of these barbers are empty most of the time.

Barber shops can have reliable clientele who come back once a month, high demand because everyone needs them, and a viable business model if the rent is not high - labor is $20 an hour, 3 clients an hour get $60 revenue, the difference can pay for rent and operating cost. $10k-$20k revenue per month is not too hard to do. (Of course that doesn't pay rents in super prime locations, so the cuts in Manhattan cost $50 instead of $20, but the principle is the same.)

I've actually seen people in those though, which doesn't invalidate it from money laundering, just makes it a less obvious one!

Perhaps women's clothing shops and pet shops are for money laundering too, since they have no direct relevance to my life.

When you have 3 bubble tea shops within 100m in a town of 15000 where the basic wage for retail is basically $4000 (Switzerland) and a rent of $2000 + $50k without counting the cost to re-arrange the shop, with at least 2 staffs and no clients any times I walk by, I have no doubt about the purpose of these shops.

Selling takeaway sugar and caffeine with a high markup and a quiet shopfront isn't a new business model. Locating them near each other is just game theory. All of this is exactly the same as Starbucks.

Bubble tea started being sold in the West to appeal to Asian immigrants. So just because you don't use it doesn't mean nobody else does.

Women's clothing, especially boutiques, are probably not a bad choice for money laundering if you could somehow pass knockoff stuff as genuine luxury articles, and have your dirty money come in as the delta between knockoff and genuine wholesale. Pet shops? I dunno.

High end clothing boutiques aren’t cash businesses though, so they’re generally not good for money laundering.

Probably not - but there are "Sample sales" that pop up in abandoned store fronts that are certainly 100% cash, and I'm sure shady shit goes down in those. I'm too fat for any of those clothes, so I just judge from outside.

I knew a pet shop in the US in the 90’s whose primary business was moving large quantities of weed around (bagged in the bottom of barrels of fish), so yeah, not impossible.