Junkman's Daughter

The story

In 1982, Pam Majors cleared out her father’s salvage hoard—he was an actual junkman who spent years filling trucks with closeouts, liquidations, and auctions—and opened a modest storefront in Little Five Points. The neighborhood was then a scruffy pocket of vacant storefronts and cheap rent, drawing artists, punks, and students. By 1994, Majors outgrew the space and moved her collection into a 10,000-square-foot former A&P grocery store on Moreland Avenue, turning a corporate supermarket footprint into Atlanta's ultimate cabinet of counterculture curiosities.

Majors passed away in 2016, handing the store to her son Moss Mills, but the original anarchy remains completely intact. Local tattoo artist Watson Atkinson painted the exterior walls and embedded a crashed UFO directly above the front doors. Inside, hand-lettered paper signs left over from the '90s hang over aisles of goth velvet, wigs, band tees, and alien incense burners. To reach the mezzanine, you walk up a 20-foot-tall staircase custom-built in the shape of a giant red high-heeled shoe, and the dressing rooms come pre-painted with zombie shadows.

Long before oddities shops became a curated internet trend, this venue was quietly selling bizarre relics to neighborhood regulars and visiting rock stars—everyone from Bono and Cyndi Lauper to Outkast and Lenny Kravitz has dug through the racks here. There are no polished museum cases or clinical displays; it remains a chaotic, lived-in anchor of old Little Five Points.