Who Put a Moose on This PT Cruiser?

Almont — Driving along the road in rural Michigan, you’re likely to notice something out of the ordinary. A few things, actually. A moose, sprawled across the top of a silver PT Cruiser. A giant bull, draped in an American flag. A huge rooster, sitting in the back of a Chevy El Camino.

You might ask yourself, who on earth came up with these statues, and put them here? That’s the whole point, however—to get you wondering. Welcome to the world of Michigan roadside attractions, the best marketing ploy there is along the side of the road.

These particular crazy statues belong to the Country Smoke House in Almont, which is essentially what it sounds like. A smoke house, primarily, selling a wild array of various smoked and cured meats.

Clearly the smoked meat business does well in rural Michigan, as they now sell cheeses, snacks, various grocery items, and shelves upon shelves of liquor, mostly varieties of bourbon whiskey. A takeaway barbecue restaurant sits on the front lawn, too, with wooden picnic tables, serving up anything from a full rack of ribs to a whole smoked turkey leg.

On a Sunday afternoon, the place was packed with people picking up food and booze at the store inside and placing barbecue orders out front. Surely, the merits of the place speak for themselves. The smoked duck breast I grabbed for a few bucks indoors sure did.

With a nice local crowd, word of mouth must be good for business. In the age of Google Maps, online reviews are even more crucial. Country Smoke House indeed has a 4.6 on Google, well above average.

Why then would a business, in this day and age, still bother with kitschy roadside statues?

First of all, because it opens up new vectors for customers and marketing beyond what’s normally expected. It draws in weird writers like me, for example.

My confession—I didn’t even know there was a store there at all. Often, when I’m taking one of my long drives through Michigan, I consult a personal oracle beforehand. A lovely, antiquated website known as roadsideamerica.com.

It’s a total blast from the past, an old Web 1.0-style website still kicking as an archive of various oddities you can find by the side of the road. In my few years writing for Enjoyer, it’s been a useful resource for finding crazy things to stop off and see while I’m traveling across the state chasing down one story or another.

On this particular day, I was driving from Lansing to Port Huron, with some time to kill, and pulled up the map of Michigan. There in Almont, just off the highway, was a listing for a “Big Steer and Moose Car.” Good enough for me!

The listings are usually pretty old, so I wasn’t surprised to see that the PT Cruiser was now silver, with a fresh coat of paint. I was surprised, however, to pull up to a thriving country store, and not just some random dude’s front yard or a ditch by the side of the road.

The Roadside America listing really didn’t do it justice. It didn’t even mention the giant rooster in the El Camino, or that there was a great outdoor barbecue joint on site.

That’s the beauty of these roadside attractions, in a way. They don’t tell you everything you’ll encounter once you pull up to take a glance. They just stand out and mark the location, telling you that something weird is in this spot, and you won’t really know what you’ll find until you step out of your car.

In the end, that’s the real reason places like this still put up these giant roadside curiosities. Even in the hyper-optimized age of internet marketing, there’s still a human desire for happenstance, randomness, chance, and curiosity.

People still want to see something interesting by the side of the road and wonder, what’s that? Businesses still want to bring in customers who are passing by, right now, with the power of curiosity.

You can target all the demographics you want with Instagram ads these days, but Zuckerberg still hasn’t figured out a better way to draw in people driving by your store than a giant bull, moose, and rooster out front. For the real roadtrippers, we wouldn’t have it any other way.