A Bucket Shop is a place where you can buy cheap tickets, usually airline or theatre tickets. But, in the times before the phrase was coined, such places were usually illegal brokerage houses that cheated their customers. The original “bucket shops” were dodgy American bars where patrons could buy cheap beer by the bucketful. By the time they had drunk a bucketful, customers had, more often than not, lost their senses and could be ripped off by the bar owner.