Ballina business owner expresses frustration at rise in thefts

A well-known Ballina businesswoman has detailed her frustration at the rise of shoplifting and drive-offs from her filling station.

Sheila Clarke, who runs Clarke’s XL on Pound Street in Ballina, was on The Hard Shoulder with Kieran Cuddihy on Newstalk last week. Ms Clarke said her shop is lucky compared to retailers in larger urban areas in that they do not have to deal with violence, but they still experience theft from their store. She said there has been a notable rise in shoplifting incidents recently.

“Our site is actually a filling station and drive-offs have become a big problem,” she said. “They’re not even trying to hide it some of the time.

“You’d pick up an empty packet of something with the contents empty, be it a packet of paracetamol and other things. On the fuel side of things, it happens where someone’s card will decline but the fuel is in the vehicle, so what do you do?

“We’re left with a scenario where the person says, ‘I’ll go out to the car, I have money in the car, I’ll be back to you in the morning’, and you’re put in a position where you can’t keep them there, you have no legal right to hold anybody.” 

Clarke’s XL is open until midnight, which adds another layer of difficulty to the situation.

“This could happen at 11.55pm, so you have take people at face value that they will come back, but nine times out of ten, they will not. We’re left then trying to report incidents to the Gardaí and it’s getting more and more difficult with GDPR.

“It’s put back on us that ‘it’s poor forecourt management’, ‘the Gardaí aren’t a debt collection service’, we’ve had all of these given back to us as responses when we try to report incidents.

“We had a drive-off incident, which was very deliberate. The driver didn’t even turn the engine off, the passenger filled the fuel, it was €130 of fuel they filled. Two years on, we have absolutely no comeback.

“We have an individual who asked for tobacco and before the assistant could do anything, he turned around and walked out the door. This is someone who’d be known to the Gardaí as well. ‘Oh well, it was only €25 worth of stuff’, but these are high-cost, low-margin items, and we did a back of the napkin calculation and in order to recoup the cost of the item, you’d have to sell 13 more packs. That’s before you even turned a light on, paid your staff, paid your licences or done anything.

“It’s getting frustrating to try and ringfence your margin or get any satisfaction. The judiciary doesn’t care as far as I can tell. If you press charges against these people, they’ll come back and pay it and there’s no case. They will keep re-offending because there’s no repercussion and they don’t care.

“There’s absolutely no support for us. As a retailer, you’re being made responsible for everyone and everything but when you’re in trouble, you’re the victim of a crime or anything else, nobody’s there for you.”