Do vape shops and barbers near you seem financially viable?

[MsGreying]

Vape shops and Barbers
Do you have a lot of these near you?
I've always wondered whether they make any money.

The Daily Express (Famous though for their "killer weather headlines" ) have a piece by Zak Garner-Purkis

I live in a town of 10 000. There are 4 barbers and 4 vape/mjnimarket shops.
Never seen anyone in the shops and very few in the barbers. The staff spend most of their time outside vaping and on their phones
So I don't see how any of them can be viable.

Only because they’re covers for illegal activity

That’s the same at the car washes too.

On three roads in the town there collectively are:

Five vape shops
SEVEN barbers
Four nail bars.

I do see the odd customer in the nail bars. But I have seen no one in the vape or barbers, except the other 'workers' who sometimes sit in the chairs and have their hair done or stand outside smoking and leering at the high school girls.

Oh, and three brightly lit up 'marts' that noone ever goes in to.

Barbers yes, always busy here abouts. Vapes and phone repair shops? Nah, always as silent as the grave.

There are over 20 in Banbury. 20!! They never seem raided. Ditto numerous nail bars full of Vietnamese people. The odd child in the back and almost always cash only

Why on earth aren’t these places raided and raided.

No. Money laundering venues.

A few years ago I used a cheap nail bar. Never again. I couldn’t get the polish off and the genuine place I used said they are known to use concrete!!

Most of them are money laundering fronts. I am in a small town and there are, at last count, 15 barbers. I kid you not. However, maybe just under half of them are legitimate businesses I think. Always busy, have been their for many years, advertise etc. The other half are, as you say, always empty and regularly change hands. I feel sorry for the legit businesses being lumped in with the clearly dodgy ones.

There have been 4 or 5 vape shops over the years. Last about a year, literally never seen anyone in one so I assume they are dodgy too.

We also have about 12 nail bars with a similar split of in use and always empty. Even the actual nail bar ones seems dodgy to me though. I vaguely know a family that run one and they appear to be bringing people over illegally and not paying them properly and they very clearly have access to a lot more ready cash than a single business owner of a moderately busy nail bar would have (the bloke drives a lamborgini and they bought a house for £1.4 million in cash. Hmmmm).

Money laundering, l have yet to see a customer in our local Turkish barbers, (one of three in our small town) and l work opposite and walk past several times a day walking my dog etc.
It is a standing joke round here but if you say as much you are labelled as racist, ah well.

I was so sad to see a barbers and a vape shop next door to each other in our pretty little town recently. No customers, just teenage schoolboys hanging around. Concerning for the children.

Ours all got raided and they were money laundering. I don’t really go into town so I don’t know if they were busy.

It’s a sign of drug dealing. You need to put the cash somewhere. It would be better if there was legalisation of cannabis to remove this incentive, along with the people trafficking the UK has to produce weed. The UK government could be making tax from it.

The government have just announced more money to tackle this. There aren’t enough staff to deal with this problems which has been ignored for about 10 years. You won’t have heard much about this in the media because they don’t like to give publicity to anything good the government are doing.

www.gov.uk/government/news/new-high-street-unit-set-up-in-nationwide-blitz-on-dodgy-shops

12! Mini market shops alone, about 5 actual vape shops and about 5 barbers in one small high st. There's been a bbc investigation recently and the police are involved due to the BBC uncovering all the drug trafficking and someone went in undercover from the BBC.
It's time to stop it all and get these shops off our high streets they are mostly a cover for illegal activities.

I live just off a busy high street in a London suburb. Some of them do well. There are two well established Turkish barbers that do good business, and several of the vape shops function as other things (a pound shop, a grocery store, a phone shop) and seem to do good business and have been there for a few years.

There are also vape shops that pop up for a year or so and then close. Must have been 10 since lockdown. Fishy as fuck.

The high street is saturated with nail shops, too -but all doing good business. Manicures are obviously in demand!

Cafes and food outlets seem to open and close quickly, though. We have a lot of chain places and I think it’s very hard for independent businesses to compete.

One of our 'minimarkets" was raided and fined for selling fake cigarettes but it's still in business.