Are corner shops and convenience stores the new Turkish Barbers?

[tighterthanaducksarse]

I've noticed over the past say 15 tears that corner shops are no longer the community hubs they once were. Often run by people of South Asian descent and were usually well stocked with food items and incidentals like fuses and sewing needles etc, you get my drift.
About 90% of the local convenience stores closed,citing ridiculous rises in rents, like more than doubled so we're no longer financially viable.
But...they've been replaced with new tenants,fitted out with high end interiors, neon lighting 24/7,open all hours. They only seem to stock pop and crisps plus fancy air fresheners. They don't stock alcohol, tobacco( only under the counter stuff) I seldom see anyone in them.
I'm in the West Midlands. Anyone else in the uk noticed this trend?

Been to Teignmouth lately? There are definitely these shops there.

I 100% agree. But these operations don't need licenses as they're not selling alcohol or tobacco ( well yes under the counter)
A licence to be a food vendor would be a good thing. Can't see it happening anytime soon.

We have one shop in our village run by a lovely young man who recently took it over. It's fab, got everything you would need in there.

I miss these people. They would deliver to the elderly, neighbours would send round cups of tea and cake and invite us to parties.

How does this work when you pay by card? I thought the money laundering aspect was due to shops declaring £500000 in cash sales for eg lots of crisps.

The card sales surely must be legitimate sales?

The corner shops and chicken shops here all accept card. There are a LOT of barbers and these are all cash only.

Cash is only part of it, I.e the low level street end. Street dealers can still be using cards to pay for their drug supplies - after all even street dealers are starting to use the cheap credit card machines to take payment, especially for more professional drug users. Still has to be legitimised/laundered via what looks like a genuine business.

The guys at the top aren’t transferring funds via yachts, super cars, artworks, etc in cash!

Buying a small bag of something for £50 in cash really is only a tiny part of the bigger picture! There are entire networks of fake businesses laundering the money!

Of course, some money laundering shops are also genuine businesses so will accept cards and sell to genuine customers, but it’s just a sideline and different owners have different ideas as to how much real business they need to have to hide the money laundering side - they make their own judgment calls as to risk etc.

Yes they really do

i think the licensing thing is a good idea

Same around here, plus a hairdresser I used for years (she wasn’t very good and it was NEVER busy, could always get a last minute appt.) I used to wonder how on earth she ever earned enough even to pay business rates, until I twigged about money laundering (her dh ran a business too.)

Most of our corner shops have turned into mini-post offices for parcel drop offs. Generally more affective than the actual post offices which only open a short time each day.

They get 20p per package. The man at the yodel corner shop is so grumpy but he gets so much business doing this! He refuses to serve you if there is someone queuing to buy a food item.

'Bob Shops' are mushrooming all over the West Midlands, especially Birmingham. If you want a nitrous oxide canister or 5, that's where to go. Then get in your car and drive crazily round the streets, cause an accident, maybe even kill or injure someone. Very common round these parts and the council and police haven't got a grip.
They're about as far from a traditional corner shop as you can get.
Along with the Turkish barbers (we've got 4 on our local shopping parade but no actual shops unless you count the 2 Bob Shops) and the like, they're just money laundering outfits.

Money laundering.

But never mind, the government is too busy chasing rich taxpayer out of the country and the police too merry going around arresting people for non crime hate incidents. What’s a few hundred billion in proceeds of crime being laundered in plain sight.

More Turkish Barbers than you can shake a stick at round here , my DS ( who is more worldly wise than me ) says they are "obviously" money laundering as they are always empty . I do see some of them busy but not as much as the old barbers . Don't know where these men are going now as they aren't in the Turkish Barbers .

And Betting Shops . I didn't think there's a massive demand , especially with the rise of online betting .

If these businesses are fronts then presumably they're paying quite a lot of tax to launder their nefarious gains. Cracking down on it would reduce that tax revenue, so the government has little incentive to clamp down on this very sizable shadow economy.

Such short sighted policies fail to address all the other harms that come with it. Eventually you end up like a poor imitation of Mexico where the power of drug lords become unfettered and all-corrupting. That's a very real danger. Think about that next time your local pillar-of-society small business magnate rolls past in his custom Mercedes.

Jeffrey Robinson's book The Laundrymen is an interesting read if you want to see the bigger picture.

Judging how busy the Turkish barbers around here are, there are probably lower effort ways to launder money. It's just the current trend. A few years they will rebrand to Austrialia brow bars or Californian ear stretching so whatever the next crazy trend is.

Vape shops, beauty salons round here.

The fake convenience shops are almost certainly making their money from selling dodgy cigs.

There are a lot of these shops in our area and the trading standards team are keeping them under close surveillance. Most if not all are fronts for selling smuggled cigarettes and tobacco. One was raided recently and over £900k of contraband tobacco products were found in very professional hiding places.

I'd have thought that a barbers is an easier money laundering front than a corner shop. Barbers don't really have to buy supplies to look like a genuine business, a corner shop would be expected to buy a fair bit of stock.

We have a Turkish barber and a Kurdish barber but both seem to be busy with customers

The first Bob shop is on Alum rock road.
it was previously a newsagents owned by an Indian man we called Bob and his wife. They were lovely and did bus passes, newspapers etc

He retired and sold the shop. - Bob shop was the easiest name.
The highest number I’ve seen is Bob shop 27 on the way to Walsall.

owners have been done for dealing and illegal workers. Regular raids on the shops. All a money laundering front.

Not necessarily, and some put "fake" expenses through the books to reduce/zeroise the profits - usually for substandard shop refurbs paying high end prices for Wickes quality products, which effectively transfers the money through other businesses owned by the same person, or within the family, or paying for the drugs from the next level up the dealer chain. HMRC have lost control and no longer do random checks on business "books", so businesses are effectively free to do what they want with very little chance of HMRC checking up on them. Some businesses won't even be registered with HMRC and will have set up and closed down within a short period of time so HMRC would never notice them.

The money laundering shops are more about getting the money into the banking system without the bank flagging up suspicious activity reports. A bank isn't going to notice someone claiming to set up a shop, then paying cash into the business bank account - the criminals know what level of cash stays under the radar. If the same bank account is used to pay staff (real or fake) and has lots of payments out for utilities, wholesalers, suppliers, etc., then the bank has no "suspicion". So cash get laundered, and HMRC often don't get a sniff of any tax!

Indeed, they buy loads of the cheapest crap possible from the wholesalers. They're not bothered whether it sells or not, because it's just a "cost of doing business" as a money launderer. If they manage to sell some of it along the way, then that's a bonus.

Just look at the mobile phone accessory shops - full of cheap imported Chinese tat, and when you ask for them to repair your iphone or replace it's battery, they look completely flummoxed as they've not got a clue so have to come up with some excuse as to why they can't do it!

A local sandwich shop near us got raided and the owners prosecuted for drug dealing and money laundering and modern slavery! No one in their right mind would actually buy a sandwich there, and it was very rare to see any customers in it but always 2/3/4 bored people behind the counter! Yet they had a counter and window display full of assorted fillings, breads, etc. Round the back, their waste skips were always full of assorted fillings, breads, etc!! I think they basically bought a load of stuff and fully expected just to bin it at the end of the day! Despite having no customers, there was nearly always an aston martin parked on the forecourt outside and a couple of "dodgy" looking blokes sat on the wall. It took the police a few years but they finally raided the place and took the owners (and family members) to court!

We have these too. The few legitimate corner shops left in my neighbourhood. Before the invasion of the dodgy shops all provided bill paying/ money transferring services.

I just assume theyre all a front for money laundering and move on with my life 😭