“You go anywhere, but not here, please,” said the lady behind the counter. “Too much has happened in the last one year.“

Putting away the microphone I was holding in one hand, I asked if I could talk to them off the record, no cameras. I was only trying to get a sense of how dairy shop owners and employees feel about the government’s recently announced measures to tackle retail crime, I said.

“I say you go ... please,” said an elderly lady who had just stepped in through a door at the back at the shop.

I apologised and left, a little bewildered. I was out and about at Sandringham, Auckland doing what I thought was a regular vox populi. Only at the next dairy I stopped at did I realise that I had stepped into the shop where a 34-year old Janak Patel had been killed during a robbery last year. “He had only been working there a few days,” the owners of the second dairy Taher Ketan and Shazia Hussain told me. “He was just filling in for the owners who had gone overseas.”

Living in fear

“I am not comfortable with English,” says Shazia Hussain as I step into her shop and tell her about the story I am working on. We could switch to Hindi, I say.

“Maine kabhi interview nahi diya hai. Overall hum itne dare hue hai, dar ke hi bass, kar rahe hai,”said Hussain.

(I have not done an interview before but overall, we are living, and working, in fear).

Her husband Taher Ketan enters the shop from the door behind the counter. “Aap bas itna likhiye,” he says- “You just write this. For as long as people are going to go unpunished, nothing that the government does will end this crime.”

“This is such a busy street. There’s a school across the road,” he says. “Can you imagine a robbery happening here?” But the shop is no stranger to robberies. “We were robbed four times in three months (in 2020),” Ketan says.

Trapped in a tiny space

As Hussain describes in detail a recent robbery where three men entered while she was alone in the shop, I am struck by how small the space is. It is not hard to imagine how intimidating it would have been for her to stand there while the men, (who in her words were much bigger than her) made off with cigarettes and cash. “Meri toh awaaz hi nahin nikli,”she says. (I couldn’t even make a sound.)

There was an incident after which he called the police but gave up when they asked him questions, says Ketan. ‘’Imagine a robber just there with a weapon,” he said, pointing to where I was standing. “and they ask me to describe the person. Will I bother to check if he is wearing glasses, or what colour shirt he has on?”

“I told them I don’t need their help and hung up,” he says. “Then they called back after five minutes.

Ketan says the tools at retailers’ disposal don’t do enough. “If the store owner has a stick, the next time someone comes in to rob, they are aware of that. If there’s a fog canon, they know it already.”

“The lady in Jyotis Dairy used the fog cannon, right? But they still hit her multiple times with a hammer,” Shazia says.

‘It can’t go on like this forever’

‘’I said to them to take what they want, just don’t hurt me,” says Bhavana Patel of Jyotis Dairy, a three-minute drive away from Ketan and Hussain’s shop. “Lekin woh mujhe fog mein bhi bar bar maarte rahein.” (But they kept hitting me, even in that fog.) A white bandage is peeking out from under her beanie- the consequence of a brazen robbery and assault less than two weeks ago.

“I could well have run away that way,” she says, pointing to an exit door at the rear of the shop. But they started attacking a 70-year old. “A neighbour who had only come in to make small talk.” So she stayed and turned on the fog cannon.

An exit through the rear is her usual response during robberies, she says. “They used to take money or things and leave us alone. But of late, they have started this trend where they will definitely hit you.”

Retailers paying the price

Retail NZ’s Public Affairs and Policy Manager Aimie Hines says retailers are paying an undue cost for crime, and it goes beyond just items lost during robberies. There’s staff training to think of, and protections that retailers have put inside or outside their stores. And the cost of insurance, for example, has risen rapidly, she says.

Taher Ketan couldn’t agree more. “$2500 insurance excess for every incident,” he says. “And the premiums - end of the day, there is almost no point in having insurance.”

The retail sector runs on small margins, says Hines, and extra costs means retailers in Aotearoa are downsizing or downgrading their insurance, which increases the risks, especially for small and medium enterprises. “The retail sector employs more than 200,000 people and they deserve to go to work in a safe place,” she says.

But in talking to dairy shop owners who have borne the brunt of retail crime, it is easy to see that “safe” isn’t what they feel in their workplaces, even in the wake of government announcements to take on retail crime.

“Janak (Patel) came from the same town as me,” says Bhavana Patel of Jyotis Dairy. “They killed him- kept hitting him until he died. Nothing happened.” Such incidents lead not only to hopelessness but also fear, she says. “I am a little scared of anyone walking in now. Like they will attack me.”

When asked about how she feels about the government’s announcements, she says “if they said they will do something, they probably will. They should.”