Ooh, a question on apostrophes.

Okay, so my English teacher brought this up yesterday and after googling for an answer nonstop without success, I'm turning to YWS to help me out.

So, there was the question that I was asked. If you have: "We took the car to Browns Garage." So where would you stick the apostrophe in brown and how would you know?

Then you have the instance where it's used: "We went shopping at Browns Department store." Again, where does the apostrophe go.

The question comes up mostly because how do you know whether there is one Brown or two.
How do you know?

How to you know whether there is one or two: context. I would assume so anyway. But in both cases they're names of businesses so the apostrophe might actually be determined by how the business decides to place it. (For example, my mom misplaced an apostrophe in the name of her business, but it was always like that since then.)

If there's more than one you would write Browns' I believe. If there is only one you would write Brown's. I won't claim to be the best about this or anything, but that's my understanding of how it should work. As you can tell by not finding an exact answer through google, it's one of of those challenging apostrophe topics.

Depends whether the garage belongs to Mister Browns or Mister Brown, or if there's more than one Mister Brown.

Presumably you haven't been told this, in which case there's no way to know the answer.

Basically, it's a trick question.