SE’s Managing Editor gets out of the office and visits seven brick-and-mortar locations along one infamous stretch of Florida highway. What he discovered is a microcosm of our industry today.
(Note: This article appears in the December 2025 issue of SE Magazine.)
If you ever want to witness Florida in its purest, most gloriously feral form, point your car toward the 262 unholy miles of U.S. Highway 19. Running south to north just inland of the Gulf, it’s a sunbaked artery clogged with decades of bad traffic, worse accidents and a parade of used-car lots broken up by the occasional Walmart Supercenter, each one guarded by the dead-eyed visages of personal-injury lawyers staring down from endless billboards. This is a road where your car isn’t a vehicle so much as a hostage to whatever maniac currently owns the fast lane. Put it this way: if the Autobahn ever developed a meth habit and a nervous twitch, it would look exactly like U.S. 19 during rush hour.
I say this from experience because, one Friday last month, StorErotica editor Kristen Burke and I decided to escape the office and drop in, unannounced, on seven brick-and-mortar adult stores along a 30-mile stretch of this Highway of Perpetual Construction.
Kristen will get into the specifics in her story starting on page 14, but here’s the wide-angle view: mile after mile of strip malls, drive-thrus, spongeboat tours, swinger resorts and two-story liquor barns. But hidden among the routine roadside clutter is a collection of adult stores that could only exist in Florida: equal parts kitsch, history and business decisions that defy all known logic in regards to what we now consider modern adult retail.
Let’s be clear: if you’re expecting sleek, high-gloss “wellness boutiques” like the ones in Miami, prepare your soul. The stores along U.S. 19 don’t bother with subtlety, polish, or basic hygiene rules. These shops wear their pink like war paint and leave exactly zero room for interpretation about the “entertainment” inside. When you pass The Pasco Pussycat, offering all-you-can-watch porn for $10 in a theater that hasn’t been updated since the Clinton administration, or pull into a Tarpon Springs parking lot where a man with a flop-sweat combover in an ’86 Cutlass sizes you up like you’re trespassing on his territory, you know you’re not in for an ordinary retail experience.
Every shop had its own personality, but all shared one trait: they are unapologetically, delightfully unhinged when it comes to selling sex goods. A few looked like modern adult retail — clean, bright, welcoming, staffed by people who clearly know their product lines. And then there were the others, where semi-dazed snowbirds in khaki shorts and orange Crocs wandered toward the private booths like salmon swimming upstream to their questionable destiny. At one particularly dimly lit stop, legit haunted-house vibes beyond the 42nd Street facade of their foyer, I turned the wrong corner and came face-to-face with an elderly man watching a movie while very much… engaged.
Enjoy yourself, sir, I’ll just see myself out.
Seven stores in 30 miles, each redefining (or outright ignoring) what adult retail looks like in 2025, yet fewer than half (Intimate Desires and XXX-Clusive in Palm Harbor, plus The Todd Couples Superstore in Port Richey) are places you’d admit to visiting. If your reps cover this stretch, trust me: send them here.
This little field trip was StorErotica’s first unofficial social experiment — not undercover, not subtle. Some stores cared, adapted, evolved. Others clung to a business model that only makes sense in Florida and only survives on a road as predictably unpredictable as U.S. 19. Some stores are cruising into the future, while others are stuck in the eternal traffic jam of their own past.
Kristofer Kay
Managing Editor
