UK seaside town described as ‘one of the best’ is being blighted by shoplifting

The picturesque seaside town of Tenby in southwest Wales is famous for its charming seaside appeal that has drawn countless visitors over the years.

However, local businesses have been grappling with a series of challenges recently in this idyllic market town on the Welsh Riviera that is touted as being ‘one of the best.’

Retailers are not only dealing with the impact of a second homes tax and gloomy weather but also another unexpected issue – shoplifting.

Fiona Malone, co-owner of Tenby Stores and Post Office—the only physical banking service in the town centre—expressed her surprise at the problem. “You don’t think about it when you come here. We didn’t when we came to Tenby,” she said.

Fiona relocated from St Albans to Tenby with her partner Vince in 2011 and has since witnessed a steady increase in bold shoplifting incidents.

The situation has worsened to such an extent that the couple, who employ 14 people, have been losing an average of £26,000 annually due to theft since the onset of Covid.

Reflecting on the change, Fiona said: “When we first moved here you’d never have thought it’d be this bad.”

She reminisced about the early days after their move in 2011 when local newspaper headlines were about bicycles being stolen from outside houses, only to be found a few streets away, reports Wales Online

“I remember when we first moved here in 2011 the local paper would have pages where headlines would be about bikes being taken from the front of people’s homes before they’d be found a couple of streets away. That was the extent of the local ‘crime’. But that’s not the case anymore,” she said.

She tells of children aged 12 or 13 targeting her store as well as elderly women – one of which was 85 – also routinely taking items without paying. “That might sound funny but it really isn’t for the people on the other end of it. It’s crippling. What we find is when we confront these thieves a lot of them don’t seem to realise how badly this affects our business.

“As things started getting back to normal after Covid we started to notice things missing from the shelves. We’d do a stock check, go through our CCTV, identify certain patterns – and it shocked us to see the granular detail of what was being stolen. Alcohol was a major item and pet food was another. We realised we were losing around £26,000 a year to shoplifting. We were horrified.”

This revelation came alongside alarming data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which indicated that reported shoplifting offences in Wales and England surged by 23% to more than 492,000 in the 12 months leading up to September 2024.

Updated numbers supplied by the Home Office also highlighted that Dyfed and Powys saw a 12% increase in shoplifting offences, totalling 2,161 for the same time span in 2022-23, marking the highest figures since the commencement of police records.

The alarming rise in retail crime has prompted the Welsh Retail Consortium to declare that the situation is “spiralling out of control.” According to the consortium, the past year saw a record 20 million incidents of theft, resulting in a staggering £2.2 billion loss for retailers.

Furthermore, shop workers in Wales are facing an unprecedented level of violence and abuse, with 100 incidents reported daily and over 2,000 violent attacks occurring in the last year alone.

Fiona said: “There now seems to be a kind of entitlement. It’s almost as if people think it’s okay. Recently Vince challenged a thief in the shop and then he got punched. The guy then said: ‘Why are you stopping me?’ People think it’s a victimless crime.

“That seems to be a big issue here. People seem to think shops are like Tesco and Sainsbury’s and can just absorb the cost and it’s all built into our pricing. But it isn’t. It’s very frustrating as independent businesses that people think doing this to us is okay.

“I’d worked before in Sainsbury’s, as had Vince, so we were aware this kind of thing happened but certainly never to this extent. A lot of people say to me that this is because of the cost of living crisis but I don’t believe that because what is being stolen from us is alcohol and high-value items. They aren’t stealing bread and eggs.”

Charlotte Broadbent, the UK general manager for wholesale marketplace Faire, says the issue has been particularly bad for more rural areas with more independent stores because it’s less likely those stores have sophisticated means of preventing crime.

But traders in Tenby have put their heads together to try to put a stop to the shoplifting epidemic.

They have set up a community space called Shop Watch where they share photos of perpetrators and exchange advice and ideas. Fiona and Vince now have some of their high-value items like alcohol behind the counter while other stores don’t have some of their higher-value items like coffee on display in case someone makes off with them without paying.

Knowing the more subtle thefts would be harder to monitor Fiona and Vince have since invested in technology which has helped. They’ve bought x-hopper headsets and cameras which are operated through AI and detect possible theft incidents, alerting staff members and recording a video which is sent immediately to each worker.

“Often it will record people, for example, taking an item off the shelf and putting it in their bag,” Fiona says. “That’s fine if they come to the till and take everything out and pay but we’ve caught an awful lot of people that think it’s fine to put everything in their pockets and leave the store. It’s been very effective. We make a point of explaining to each person how we caught them.

“Unfortunately what we now find is we’re one of the lucky ones as this isn’t a case of just theft for many. Some of my colleagues have been assaulted, threatened with hammers, and had people jumping over their counters. It has left staff traumatised.”

Sara Jones, head of the Welsh Retail Consortium, said the latest figures show the “shocking reality of retail crime and its impact on our colleagues and communities.

“Theft now costs Welsh retailers £100m a year, which leads to customers having to face both higher prices and more inconvenient shopping as retailers have to mitigate the costs and shrinkage resulting from this criminal behaviour.

“It’s not acceptable that retail staff in Wales have to operate in this climate of fear. Whilst the recent [UK Government] budget announcement of £3m to help tackle retail crime is a good start the reality is a much greater effort is needed across the criminal justice system to get this situation under control and protect workers and customers.”

In response to the growing concern, Dyfed-Powys Police and Crime Commissioner Dafydd Llywelyn acknowledged the uptick in retail crime within his jurisdiction last year.

He outlined the force’s proactive measures, saying: “He said the force had created a retail crime strategy linked to neighbourhood policing teams and had drafted a retail crime action plan to offer support to traders.”

These initiatives aim to bolster confidence among the retail community served by Dyfed-Powys Police.