Independent convenience stores are up against it. Trade is falling as supermarkets continue to encroach on the convenience space and up the ante on price. Costs are rising: the living wage, NICs, energy bills and potentially business rates are all hitting hard. Legislation is also hurting independents, in terms of tobacco and now vaping.
And last but not least, there’s crime. Shoplifting is rife. And while some even middle-class thieves kid themselves it’s OK to steal from supermarkets because ‘they make too much money’ or it ‘serves them right for axing the checkout staff’ the reality is shoplifters are targeting little, local independents just as much as the big boys. And unlike them, they can’t afford security.
The latest ONS figures, out this week, show 530,000 shop theft incidents in England and Wales in the year to June 2025. But they fail to do justice to the scale of the issue: the ACS 2025 Crime Report found 6.2 million incidents recorded by convenience retailers alone.
The good news is that at long last the government is acting. The Crime and Policing Bill completed its second reading in the House of Lords last week. This will remove the ludicrous £200 threshold for ‘low level’ theft, and introduce a standalone offence for assaulting a retail worker.
But a police crackdown on organised crime has alarmingly identified that more than 100 convenience stores have been buying items stolen from supermarkets and reselling them at discounted prices. Seven of the nine shops that were handed emergency closure orders were convenience stores.
We tend to think of independent convenience stores as innocent victims of the shoplifting epidemic. And for the most part they are. But as this story shows, there are bad apples. And it’s not just groceries. Every week raids involving police and Trading Standards officers are seizing illegal tobacco, cigarettes and vapes. Bought under the counter in c-stores and minimarts across the country, counterfeit cigarettes cost the HMRC £2.8bn a year (with further losses incurred by tobacco manufacturers and rival retailers of course). In other words, the police is investigating shops as much as protecting them.
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