Bucket shop refers to a particular type of fraudulent business:
- Bucket shop (heraldry)
- Bucket shop (stock market)
The term is used as a pejorative colloquialism to refer to different kinds of businesses, indicating that the speaker believes it is a fraud or scam. In this sense it might be used as a name for stock market, unregulated credit default swaps, or for heraldry scams.
The term is also used of airline ticket consolidators, though in this case there is no implication of fraud.
Famous quotes containing the words bucket and/or shop:
“And now, far removed from the loved habitation,
The tear of regret will intrusively swell,
As fancy reverts to my father’s plantation,
And sighs for the bucket that hung in the well.”
—Samuel Woodworth (1788–1842)
“So it is with books, for the most part: they work no redemption on us. The bookseller might certainly know that his customers are in no respect better for the purchase and consumption of his wares. The volume is dear at a dollar, and after to reading to weariness the lettered backs, we leave the shop with a sigh, and learn, as I did without surprise of a surly bank director, that in bank parlors they estimate all stocks of this kind as rubbish.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)