DES MOINES - Clint Lingman, owner of Hams and Clams, downtown’s premier sex shop for some 15 years, is closing shop following stay at home orders and record low sales during the pandemic. “Business was already slowing down before the coronavirus with unlimited free options for porn online,” Lingman lamented. “You have to try pretty hard to pay for pornography nowadays. But we also offer gifts, bachelor and bachelorette party favors, marital aides, an adult arcade. We’re a full-service smut shop. Well, we were.”
He said there is no going-out-of-business sale with his kind of store. “It’ll be chocolate tits for lunch, and chocolate cocks for dinner at the Lingman house for a while. Can you think of another use for a rubber fist? How about eight of them?”
A father of four, Lingman knows that it’ll be a struggle to get back on his feet. “If I needed a little extra money before, I would do happy hour prices all day on the nudie booths,” he said referencing private booths where people pay for a personal burlesque show.
“I’m really taking it in the rear. Normally I’d say ‘that’s what she said,’ but COVID-19 has taken all of the fun out of it.”
Hams and Clams will close on the last day of the month.
