One of my favorite stores to browse is a paper store.
 

I don't really do crafts or anything, but there's this store that sells a bunch of paper, like wrapping paper, craft paper, book-binding quality paper, that sort of thing, and it's incredible just to look around and see all that shit. I almost never buy anything, because - again - I'm not crafty so I have no use for it. But it's pretty b.a.

Do you nerds like browsing around stores that are way outside of your purview? TELL ME ABOUT THESE PLACES.

I fucking love Michael's for this very reason. But there's SHIT into shit. Fabrics, beads, tiny malleable metals, wood/plastic crafts, types of paints, brushes, stickers. My god. I should work there.

Michael's really bothers me. It's messier than fuck (at least the one around here), and impossible to find what you're looking for.

I like to look at antique stores. When I was in Omaha for a trip, we spent about most of our time in the old market district looking at the antique/used crap stores there. It's just interesting to see all the old stuff, especially photographs. Creepy to be looking through photographs of people you don't know and who are probably dead, sure, but interesting at the least. I really love looking through clothes, too. Dear god so many ugly things and so many beautiful things.

Every time I'm in a crafts store or just a crafts section of some larger, shittier store I get an urge to just BUY ALL OF THE BEADS GLUESTICK YES CHARMS GLITTER BANGLES YES

But then I realize

I will only glue it all together into a big spangly ball for my cat to play with. Now I think about it maybe I should cover my PC case in glitter and rhinestones. Yes. And puffy stickers. Puffy unicorn stickers. BEST FRIENDS written in hot pink in a circle around the PSU fan. Plan comin' together.

Additional Spam:
That is apparently what my mind goes to when I think of "crafts": using a bunch of useless crap to make a mess. I apologize for nothing.

Hardware stores are like heaven on Earth, if heaven is a scary, cavernous space full of things that fill me with anxiety because I don't know to use them. I just ignore all that stuff and head straight to the MOTHERFUCKING DOORS and ENDLESS CHAIN SPOOLS.

Fabric stores are a guilty pleasure of mine.

There's a Joann Fabrics not to far from where I live. From time to time, I find myself browsing there thinking of all the things I could do as a future cosplay idea.

Then I remember, "FUCK. I CAN'T SEW."

:(

Fuck that noise. Anybody can sew. Now I grant you not everybody can sew WELL. Not everybody can sew in a way that looks good, that fits things together right, that's gonna hold up and last, but! But! If you're just sewin' some cosplay shit go hog wild

No matter how you fuck it up there's gonna be some character in something that looks exactly like the horrible mess you made Japan is helpful like that

Paper stores are pretty great, but I tend to avoid paper stores, craft stores, fabric stores, and even hardware stores not because I don't enjoy them or can't think of brilliant things to do with everything, but because my wife will invariably spend all the money. And it's not because she's a sieve when it comes to money, she just gets all those crafty ideas and such and then wants to actually, y'know, do them.

Unfortunately (?) I do not really enter stores outside my purview! It's predominantly book stores (f yeah used book stores) with the occasional toy store. Paper stores are fantastic though and there aren't enough of them near me. One of the local art galleries sells things like rice paper though, and I always get some when I go there. :B

When I was a kid though I'd always hang out in the dollhouse/miniatures aisle of craft stores. I rarely bought anything 'cause I had no money but they were so cool.

There are MLP FiM-themed puffy stickers.
I'm just sayin'.

I love browsing used bookstores because you never know what little gem you'll find. Also, art supplies stores. I like trying out different kinds of pens, and also checking different paper quality/textures.

I prefer ???? online store you can get knifes, flame thrower and fly swats there , i still have coupons if some is interested in 0,2% off °°

This is true. I've gone to enough to realize there's always a worse [this character] than the one you are/the one you're looking at.

Craft/fabric/paper shops, definitely. Anything to do with stationary as well - I'm a fiend for the stuff. I also love looking around delicatessens despite the fact I'm poor and not a particularly fancy cook. Oh, and looking at plants as well, seriously no idea why because I'm a menace to most anything botanical :(

Oh yes, this too. I'm hoping my supernatural ability to kill houseplants is at least partially blameable on living in an apartment, and that one day a real house will cure me. >.>

I like arts and crafts, even if I have zero creativity in that field... Not even enough to make a big shiny ball out of the things I like in those places.

I love going to this Chinese (food, cooking utensils, spices, statues, toys, etc) warehouse downtown to see all the bizarre (to my westernized mind) things that are bottled up over there. Nothing like seeing starfish (or brains, pupae, eggs, etc) presoaked in ginger before being emersed in vinegar for several months and just sitting there in a jar, watching you. I'm being creative here, but I'm sure some combinations of what I've mentioned have been done.

Does visiting jewelry stores in order to see my gf squirm for a bit before leaving and settling for a waffle cone count?

Oh, yeah, I love looking at plants too, and am also a menace to. ;_;

This is dangerous territory for me.

I enjoy Home Depot more than I enjoy Michaels these days, if only because of the sheer potential that exists on the shelves and in the products are much higher at the depot than at Michaels.

Michaels just depresses me now. I've become a yarn snob, so my only reason to shop there is gone. I also make most of my own whatever because I really hate how much places like Michaels charges for shit.

I've never been into paper crafts. I can't bring myself to care about the millions of different prints and colors on paper. Or ribbon. Or stamps. Or beads. None of that thrills me anymore.

But fabric. Oh man. I love me some fabric. The colors and the draping and the stuff you can do and make with it. I could spend hundreds of dollars on fat quarters alone in Joann's.

Any place that has raw materials thrills me. The possibility of creation gets me every time, and even if I don't walk out with anything, I always enjoy that rush I get thinking of what could be.

Usually I end up getting recommendations from Amazon and browsing sections I would normally never venture into. Men's watches, groceries, energy drinks (Duff and Brawndo brand, no less), but I think one of the more vivid memories of this was after I bought The Hunger Games book and started getting survival gear recommendations. Suddenly, I was knee-deep in tents, iodine pills, combine bows and steel-tipped arrows, you name it. I even idly started budgeting for the apocalypse in my head.

Shit started spooking me out about the day I might actually need those things, so I stopped looking.

As for physical stores, I could get lost in a tabletop gaming store for hours. Lore and worldcrafting can consume my attention for a long time. I used to buy miniatures regularly, (painted a few) but eventually ran out of places to put them. Since I didn't actively play any games, that was the end of my brush with neckbearddom.

Funny enough, working at a Japanese $1.50 store has destroyed all desire for consumerism.

Craft stores, stationery stores... anything that has the potential to be made into something. I have to resist adding to my stockpile of "cool stuff that I should turn into something" pile that's been growing the last however many years.

Most recently it's been Kinokunia in Sydney. I now have some art/tea tray and a pen that replicates the brushwork of a Chinese ink brush. Still in its packaging.

Huh, a pen that replicates Chinese brushwork? That's awesome. Are you supposed to hold it like a real Chinese ink brush, or does it just simulate the effect when you write with it normally? Unfortunately my Chinese calligraphy is tarnished by years of rust; I imagine it would take too much work hobbify it again.

Stationery is weirdly addictive. My handwriting is pretty bad, but that doesn't stop me from buying fountain pens and cute notepads and other things that will spend most of their life sitting on my desk. I think I've spent more on Jetpens than on newegg or Amazon recently.

Also, for some reason, every single time I go into a Home Depot or Harbor Freight, I wind up buying the one thing I need and three or for random tools that sit in my box forever. I blame the weird plastic fume smell that hardware stores always seem to have. It's probably about as bad for your brain as sniffing glue.

Furniture stores are also pretty fascinating.

As a grown man, I can walk through these fantasy versions of people's homes, going from Coach's Leather Paradise to African Queen's Dining Suite, and it's all perfectly normal for me to sit down and imagine if I'm the type of dude to commit to buying a scene like that and then living with it for at least half a decade of my life.

The clerks creep out of the fake bushes to make a sale, and you can see in their eyes that their very lives depend your love of zebra print sofas. It's so easy to imagine them retreating to their favorite design setting when the lights go out at night.

Oh gosh, Ikea. I could spend forever at Ikea. The problem with most furniture stores for me is that they get the interior designer in me going, and I have no outlet for it.

It's like the real deal, except the ink is stored within the brush barrel instead of rubbing some charcoal and dipping your bush into fresh ink. Basically self contained version of the traditional brush.

I have some wolf's hair brushes and have used those to both write and paint so I'm looking forward to test driving this smaller version for detail work (eventually...)