The Welsh seaside town where shoplifting is so bad trader has been losing £26,000 a year

Tenby in southwest Wales is widely recognised for its quirky chocolate-box setting beside the sea which has brought in hundreds of thousands of visitors a year for generations. But life has been tough recently for traders here. Off the back of a difficult year in the idyllic market town dubbed the Welsh Riviera retailers trying to make a living often talk of the impact of a second homes tax and drab weather but now they’ve got another problem to contend with – one they didn’t ever expect.

“You don’t think about it when you come here. We didn’t when we came to Tenby,” Fiona Malone, co-owner of Tenby Stores and Post Office, which has the town centre’s only physical banking service, says. She moved to Tenby from St Albans in 2011 with her partner Vince and says she’s seen a steady growth in “brazen” shoplifting ever since. It’s so bad that since Covid the couple, who employ 14 people, have been losing £26,000 a year on average from theft alone.

“When we first moved here you’d never have thought it’d be this bad,” she recalls. “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.”

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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.”

It comes after figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed shoplifting offences reported in Wales and England rose by 23% to more than 492,000 in the 12 months to September 2024. New figures for the same period published by the Home Office showed Dyfed and Powys recorded 2,161 shoplifting offences – up by 12% for the same period in 2022-23. The figures nationally are the highest since police records began.

It had led to the Welsh Retail Consortium declaring retail crime is “spiralling out of control”. The body representing traders also says last year theft reached an all-time high with 20m incidents costing retailers £2.2bn. According to the consortium there are now 100 incidents of violence or abuse to Welsh shop workers too every single day with more than 2,000 violent attacks in the last year.

Fiona says: “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.”

The Dyfed-Powys Police and Crime Commissioner Dafydd Llywelyn last year acknowledged retail crime had increased in the force area. 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. He said the initiatives were aimed at building confidence among retailers across the area covered by Dyfed-Powys Police.

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