The candy stores of Oxford Street | Hacker News Reader

The candy stores of Oxford Street

diamondgeezer.blogspot.com

142 pointszeristor224 comments

The real story here is that over the last 12 years of UK government, austerity policies have cut back all public services to the point where they don't actually exist.

Criminal Barristers are currently on strike because the legal aid system is so broken. Close to 10% of the entire country are currently on an NHS waiting list, with that number expected to continue to rise until atleast 2024. Meanwhile, the tax burden in the UK has reached it's highest point in 70 years - putting us in a similar position to the 1950s where the UK was paying back the debts from WW2. The Home Office has just announced that after years of failing to stop immigrants from reaching the UK by boarding small boats to cross the channel, the government has entirely abandoned its responsbility to grant asylum to asylum seekers and instead will pay millions of pounds to have Rwanda do it for us (in order to deter the immigrants that we've failed to stop crossing the channel, because we can't stop them crossing the channel).

Essentially we see this story repeatedly and the underlying question is "Why has no one actually investigated what seems to be an obviously illegal enterprise" and the answer is "Because we don't employ anyone to do that anymore".

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> In the plans, single men who arrive illegally in boats or lorries will be sent to Rwanda

Which depending on which organisation you speak to, may or may not be legal:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61122241

Personally, I'm embarrassed at how xenophobic and closed-minded my country has become.

Also crossing the channel for the purpose of claiming asylum is not actually illegal.

The government’s plan has faced objections from across the political spectrum. It’s widely accepted that it’s highly immoral. The people that agree with it are by far a minority.

It's unpopular with left-leaning journalists, lawyers, and politicians. Polls are mixed about whether it's popular with the general public, but that's what elections are for.

To claim asylum in the UK you must be physically present in the UK. Which means that functionally, there are no "proper channels" through which the vast majority of these asylum seekers could apply they have to cross the UK borders illegally first. But that wasn't the point of my comment, I was pointing out that this policy is only in place because the government has completely failed to prevent these border crossings and this policy is essentially just them giving up on trying.

I would be quite surprised if the policy ever actually comes into effect given the timing of its announcement before the local elections.

I mean if the UK were to provide transportation into the UK they wouldn't arrive, as you call it, "illegaly". How do you seek asylum in the UK through proper channels, in your opinion?

That said, it reminds me of the EU paying Libya and Turkey to keep migrants/asylum seekers from crossing over to Europe. I'm not convinced the migrants are being treated fairly.

The "fix" for reducing migration isn't to raise up walls and barriers, but to help improve circumstances in the country of origins; improve stability and economic outlook and the like. That said, another approach to reduce migration to the UK seems to be to make it less attractive.

> The "fix" for reducing migration isn't to raise up walls and barriers, but to help improve circumstances in the country of origins

Migrants are typically among the most motivated people in the source country. They are the ones that can get it together to organize transport, travel a great distance, maybe learn a new language… altogether a great effort. Perhaps one way to improve circumstances in the country of origin would be for those people to stay at home and put their effort into their own country.

But it turns out we actually like the economic consequences of having those type of immigrants in our country. They are, by and large, hard working and skilled. And so we continue to brain-drain the countries of origin, at their expense.

Without looking it up, are you aware of and can you identify the "proper channels" for claiming asylum in the UK?

I ask as most people who claim asylum seekers should do so "properly & legally" are unable to describe what that process is and I find it odd that people keep referring to a process they have no idea about.

TalkRadio in the UK has a lot to answer for. Self-important blowhards spouting this nonsense day in and day out but, like you say, when you probe even slightly in to the detail, there's nothing.

I used to work in an office where colleagues insisted on listening to radio phone-ins and my choice was either headphones or deep hatred & anger towards the ignorant callers. Usual choice was headphones, better for the stress levels!

> This is a very bitter /r/unitedkingdom-style comment, I don't expect to see things like this on HN.

most posts about the UK now on HN turn into a /r/unitedkingdom whingefest about government policy mostly unrelated to the topic

can you imagine if every post about something in the US was the same?

mods need to step it up

Or maybe it's just the common viewpoint among most computer-literate, non-retired Brits.

presumably computer-literate people are more than capable of finding an appropriate place to soapbox their political views.

It tends to be more popular among middle class people, and much less popular among working class people who actually bear the brunt of uncontrolled immigration. It's not the middle classes who are struggling to find social housing or any housing at all.

> uncontrolled immigration

Obviously not true.

Anyway blaming government failures such as social housing on immigration is a well known trick.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/oct/04/how-did-the-...

If anyone who can get in a boat in France can migrate to the UK, that is, by definition, uncontrolled. What you call "a well known trick" is, in fact, a perfectly reasonable argument, whatever the Guardian wants to say about it. It is fact that we have a massive shortfall in social housing. What caused that shortfall is largely irrelevant.

There are controls on immigration therefore it is not uncontrolled. The fact that a few desperate people are prepared to risk their lives in the Channel doesn't make it uncontrolled.

"Not building enough social housing is largely irrelevant to dealing with the social housing crisis." Hmmm.

How exactly are illegal entries into the UK via small boats controlled?

If this is controlled, why has the number of people arriving in this manner grown enormously in recent years?

Also way to misrepresent the other commenter’s perfectly valid point.

If Border Force intercepts a boat, they bring them ashore and hold the arrivals in short-term detentions centres. The vast majority of these people then apply for asylum, and the majority of claims are accepted. If they do not claim asylum or are refused, they face prosecution or removal.

The proportion of crossings by boat has increased relative to other means (air/lorries) because the technology for detecting undocumented entries via those other means has improved.

All this is easily looked up. The argument that "some people have done this therefore it is uncontrolled" is absurd.

The fact many (note: not all) of those crossing via this means are intercepted and processed through an administrative process does not make it controlled migration.

There is a process in place to deport illegal immigrants and thousands are forcibly returned every year.

About 3000 were forcibly returned between June 2020 and June 2021, although the vast majority of those (2,809) are people convicted of a crime. Few non-criminals are forcibly returned to their point of origin once they are in the country, regardless of their immigration status. Three-quarters of people who enter immigration detention after illegally entering the country are released into the population without being returned.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-statist...

> If anyone who can get in a boat in France can migrate to the UK, that is, by definition, uncontrolled.

So this isn’t true at all. You’ve just demonstrated that your own justification is false.

I guess the country is un-policed as well, considering that there still are some people who break the law.

Actually, it is not.

The shortfall in UK's social housing can be traced back to Thatcher's policy of forcing councils to sell off their housing stock at firesale prices, and forbid them from using the money to build new ones.

Calling that an act of vandalism would be grossly unfair to the relevant Germanic tribes.

That may well be true. Thatcher gambled that home owners were more likely to vote conservative (and she was right). But an investigation of the historical cause of our lack of social housing does nothing to solve the problem in 2022, which is what I meant when I said it is irrelevant. We have hundreds of thousands fewer houses than we need, so it doesn't make sense to significantly increase the population of people who will need social housing.

> who actually bear the brunt of uncontrolled immigration

Any kind of source would be useful for such claims.

> It's not the middle classes who are struggling to find social housing or any housing at all.

I guess it depends on your definition of middle class. Middle class is currently the part that's being squeezed, way more than the poor (you can't get money from someone who hasn't any). So yeah, the middle class does get by marginally better than the poor (who often live in Dickensian conditions, true). But bringing down the middle class is not going to solve any of this. On the contrary, the middle class is what you need to develop to get a healthy democracy. The problem is the long tail of high incomes, roughly from the 8th decile up. Including the well-to-do conservatives who fan the flames and keep spreading the idea that the culprits are everybody but themselves.

How would you suggest the UK "stops the small boats"? Any attempt to stop them by force or push them back would result in a large number of drowned migrants. The only way to stop them is to discourage them from getting in the boats in the first place. It would be nice if the French did that on their side of the channel, but they don't.

The point of the Rwanda scheme is to make getting in the boat an undesirable option, because you'll just end up somewhere you don't want to be. The hope is that few people will have to be sent to Rwanda because they'll stop paying people smugglers to make the trip.

Why this false dichotomy? Either we do whatever authoritarian crap the Home Office are pushing this month or it's pushing people back into the sea and drowning them? No. What will discourage people from getting into boats is to provide safe routes in. Literally a desk in Calais where you can walk up and say "I'm going to request asylum and need a ferry ticket, have Borders Agency meet me at the other side please" would undercut the people smugglers to the extent that you wouldn't have boats any more. The French offered us almost exactly this but we turned them down.

And when an asylum claim fails, what happens to the asylum seeker? The French won't take them back, so what generally happens is that they stay in the UK regardless of whether the claim is justified. That's equivalent to having open borders, which I suspect is the underlying objective of many who strongly object to this scheme.

Plus, of course, they are already in France. They could claim asylum there.

> And when an asylum claim fails, what happens to the asylum seeker?

That's totally irrelevant, and not what we're talking about though. This scheme pre-judges that. It exposes the scheme for what it is: it's not about the boats, it's about the people in them.

> Plus, of course, they are already in France. They could claim asylum there.

And the vast, vast majority of them do. The ones that don't have their reasons, which they are best placed to judge.

"That's totally irrelevant, and not what we're talking about though."

Well yes, we were originally talking about shops selling American candy...

Sigh, yes I was thinking something similar. Not sure how we got from suspect sweet stores to illegal immigrants ...

Thanks, your comment made me smile.

Few are willing to say it outright, but the objective is not to discourage them from getting into small boats, but to discourage them from coming at all.

The UK remains nominally committed to providing asylum for people who fear for their lives in their home country, so the latest scheme is designed to call the asylum seeker’s bluff: “we will guarantee your safety, but it will be in Rwanda”. Anyone genuinely fearing for their lives will presumably be happy to take the offer of safe haven. The economic migrants presumably will not.

Refugees' lives are rarely at risk. The reason that refugees leave 'safe' camps is that they, more often than not, will live with with the prospect of living their whole lives in a tent and subsisting off WFP rice bags. It's incredibly grim; life expectancies in long established camps are often under 45. Technically these people are economic migrants.

> https://www.habitatforhumanity.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/201...

> Refugees' lives are rarely at risk... It's incredibly grim; life expectancies in long established camps are often under 45.

Sounds to me like their lives are at risk, just more slowly than previously.

"Economic migrants" is a category invented to justify atrocities. After you've financialized basic necessities, of course the the reasons for "migrating" are economic!

And what is the solution then when the population of the UK is 100 million, Or 200 million, and more still want to come? The government already lie about the genuine population because the numbers are so alarming. There has to be an upper limit on the desirable population of the UK before life becomes miserable: this is a small island and already one of the most densely populated places on earth in parts and little space to expand without further significant impact, no genuine wilderness, increasing pressure on the pockets of decent biodiversity left etc. etc.

There's plenty of room if there's still single story buildings in London.

Residential housing take up only ca 5 percent of UK land. The only reason it's that high is due to huge amount of low density housing (e.g. my terraced road w/houses and gardens take up ca. 40,000m2, near my local station the same number of people will soon be housed on ca. 2,000m2). Space is not an issue. Other infrastructure, maybe, but UK is going to need increasing amounts of immigration over coming years to offeset below replacement fertility rates to prevent a demographic crisis.

With fertility rates plummeting worldwide, there's no realistic scenario where the UK will be overrun.

Then you should be happy because Rwanda will do exactly what you said the French should have done.

Except they won't. The deportations are for asylum application in Rwanda, not to process them for onward passage back to the UK. This is trivial stuff.

Besides which, costs per applicant under a "desk in Calais" scheme would cost peanuts. Remind me how much the Rwanda scheme costs, per asylum seeker?

Given that failed asylum seekers will almost never be deported, you are essentially arguing for unlimited migration here.

And you're arguing for zero, which is frankly ridiculous.

No one is arguing for zero immigration. That's a fiction you've invented. I'm arguing for controlled legal immigration: i.e, the UK gets to decide who comes to live here. I was entirely supportive of the recent scheme for Ukrainians and the earlier BNO visa scheme for Hong Kong residents.

On what basis have you earned the right to reside in the U.K.?

Don’t say “I was born here” - you didn’t earn that. How would you fare on the points based visa scheme? Would you support an initiative to strip undesirable people (i.e. all those who have inadequate points) of their citizenship, so “better” people with more points can replace them?

Yes — a society should preference it’s own children over outsiders.

That’s essential to its continued existence. You’re simply arguing that you have a right to loot UK families, destroying their society in the process, to give their money to people you feel are “more deserving”.

I think that’s borderline genocidal.

Funnily enough, that describes UK’s policy towards others for the past few hundred years.

There's a responsibility under refugee conventions to take on people needing asylum. The conflation of them with illegal immigration is quite ridiculous. The UK is a rich country (~6th highest in the world), we should shoulder some of the (small) burden that we're asked to - many other, poorer, countries take on much higher refugee burdens.

As in not feasible or ridiculous as a matter of principle? Would it be ridiculous for any other country or is the UK specially situated?

> almost never

Just to ground this discussion in some actual data, here are the figures from a 2019 news article[0]:

"It shows how, of the 80,813 applications that were refused or withdrawn between 2010 and 2016, only 29,659 individuals were removed, leaving 51,154 failed asylum seekers in the country from that seven-year period."

So it would be better to say that "only 37% of failed asylum seekers are deported". Also, I don't think that 51,154 people in seven years entering a country of 69 million really represents "unlimited migration".

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/fewer-than-half-of-failed-asylum-...

What does it mean for an application to be "withdrawn"? If an asylum seeker gets a marriage/family/work visa and stops a now-unnecessary asylum process, is that a withdrawn application?

I suspect that "withdrawn" normally means the UK government has paid them to cancel their asylum request and leave the country (after which, admittedly, they might try again) but I don't have the figures to know how common that is.

This doesn't solve the problem.

Apparently it's also a communication thing.

Smugglers have motivation to say how good it is if you make it.

People hear and share weird information.

Given even the Home Office, an organisation which has basically institutionalised cruelty, is finding this one hard to stomach, I think the point is more that you have to look at the motivations for why they went with this idea: red meat for the mouth breathers.

If by "mouth breathers" you mean the majority of the UK population who would like immigration reduced, then yes, it probably is meant to appeal to them.

I think by "mouth breathers" they mean folks who are willing to dehumanise folks less lucky than themselves to have been born somewhere with relative economic prosperity because this is "our country".

Also, those same people who are willing to buy newspapers that _gleefully_ employ columnists who also dehumanise these humans on an almost daily basis.

People who fall for populist nonsense just before an election spouted from a government who have, over more than a decade, entirely failed to reduce immigration and yet convince the electorate that they're the best people for that particular job.

I also reject the notion that the majority of the population would like immigration reduced (I certainly don't, especially refugees fleeing wars that we are at least, in part, responsible for). Considering the chronic shortage of skilled workers in the UK (due to our underfunded education system), I don't see how that's possible.

and the pushback policy has now been withdrawn - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/25/uk-refugee-p...

Shocker /s

Almost like they knew it was going to end like this but now they can say that they tried, only to be stopped by the "activist judges". (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54687081)

This government's attacks on the judiciary is nothing short of awful.

>How would you suggest the UK "stops the small boats"?

Instead of financing the wars that create the poverty that these people are fleeing from, use that financing to improve services in their society and create better standards of living.

Its not like the English don't have a long history of colonialism and imperialism to pay for. The debt is due. More should be done to make up the damage done by hundreds of years of exploitation by English lords.

Handing out cash does not solve any problems. Cf. Afghanistan.

You don't just build a modern country or civilization by dropping some helicopter-dollars, that's not how it works. Unless you tell me you want to send doctors, engineers, school teachers, etc, there, to "civilize" them, but i thought you were against colonization ?

What do you mean by handing out cash cf. Afganistan? Last I heard Afganistan's billions of cash reserves were seized by USA. You mean handing out Afgani cash to US oligarchs does not solve any problems? I can agree with that.

"Half a billion dollars of aircraft that flew for about a year. A huge $85 million hotel that never opened, and sits in disrepair. Camouflage uniforms for the Afghan army whose fancy pattern would cost an extra $28 million. A healthcare facility listed as located in the Mediterranean Sea.

These are part of a catalog of "waste, fraud and abuse" complaints made against the United States' reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan -- an effort totaling $145 billion over 20 years -- made by the United States' own inspector general into the war. But the in-depth audits detailing these findings have, for the most part, been taken offline at the request of the State Department, citing security concerns."

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/07/asia/us-afghanistan-spend...

You can't honestly be comparing the heinous wastefulness of an out-of-control military industrial complex' spending, with the civil desire to instead be funding schools and water treatment plants and hospitals and universities, and roads and bridges and clinics and other civil institutions targeted for destruction in the initial hours of the Wests bombing campaigns against the people caught in our targeting reticles...

It's fascinating that you specify "the English". As if the Scottish, French, Spanish, Turkish, and many others don't have a history of colonialism. Plus, your argument seems to imply that English people today must pay for the actions of their ancestors, which is quite a strong claim.

To be fair, Scotland did try and be a colonial power - but was incredibly incompetent at it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

It's kind of interesting that the area is to this day pretty rough, devoid of big settlements and the single reason you can't drive the length of the Americas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

Though to be clear I agree that it was incompetence that scuppered the scheme, reading little snippets on the scheme itself the colonists were woefully ill equipped for the task of creating a settlement.

My favourite bit is that the organisation set up to handle the English "bail out" money eventually became RBS which, a few hundred years later ended up requiring yet another epic bailout from the UK government.

I had no idea about that, what an interesting fact :D

I got that from the book "Shredded: Inside RBS: The Bank that Broke Britain" by Ian Fraser.

Another interesting fact: for a short while before it imploded, RBS was actually the largest bank in the world by assets!

The Spanish and Turkish have nothing to do with refugees crossing the channel, though. Why these people do that is because of the previous presence of the British Empire in their corner of the world, otherwise they'd have stopped on the way; there are several countries they have to cross that are not really any worse than the UK for people in their situation.

The Spanish have their own share of problems at their border with Morocco and along their mediterranean coast.

What has the former British empire got to do with choice of destination? Do you mean English speaking?

I though the reason they aim for the UK is the impression of a good quality of life.

For Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East in general, yes, the language and some kind of cultural knowledge. The same reason why a lot of Vietnamese, Laotian, or Lebanese refugees went to France some decades ago. They need to know about the quality of life, which happens mostly if there is some kind of cultural contact.

Quality of life in the UK is good, don't get me wrong, but not orders of magnitude better than what they could find on the continent.

The reason they desire to come to the UK is that is where the bombs are not being dropped by UK's forces and their allies.

Unless I've been unusually inattentive, I think I'm right in saying the UK isn't currently dropping bombs on France.

Its fascinating that your sly xenophobia has been applied in an argument posited in a thread specifically about Oxford Street, a very English institution, in an attempt to deflect from the very real crimes against humanity for which the English people, as recipients of war treasure, are indeed responsible.

Whataboutism is the last resort of cowards. The fact is, the UK (euphemistically referred to as the "English" by most of the rest of the non-Anglo world) has the blood of millions of innocent victims on its hands TODAY. Not just generationally, but in the context of the current zeitgeist, the "English" are recipients of a great deal of war treasure in the form of direct arms sales to extremist, totalitarian-authoritarian fascist entities across the globe. TODAY.

It is why there are 34 million refugees from our wars out there, today, desperate to escape the bombings that have been carried out on average every twenty minutes, for the last twenty years...

Those bomb sales are war treasure to more than just the denizens of Oxford Street.

did the UK sold bombs (and other armaments) to the regimes of Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Libya... responsible for some of the refugee crisis you're talking about?

Yes. In fact, they did. And they also dropped bombs on those states, causing immense suffering for the civilians that became refugees.

Which wars are you talking about?

Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan .. and now Ukraine.

The UK military-industrial oligarchical system has its fingers in all of these heinous pies. Yet the UK social system is not prepared to subject itself to the indignity of a single war refugee finding solace from the Wests' incessant bombing...

The UK is bombing Ukraine?

It is certainly delivering weapons specifically for the purpose of making Ukraine into a living hell.

For invading forces you mean? The ones making life hell for the native population?

> How would you suggest the UK "stops the small boats"?

We don't. We treat humans with dignity and accept them on to our shores to process their asylum claims.

We allow asylum seekers to work and pay taxes while that happens. As a society we both demonise asylum seekers for "not contributing" whilst also making it illegal for them to do so.

> The only way to stop them is to discourage them from getting in the boats in the first place.

Which does not work because to quite a lot of people drowning in the Channel is preferable to what they fled back home if there is the tiniest of chances that they can actually make it to a place where they or their children can actually make a living. This line of reasoning is like "let's use harder punishments to dissuade the others". It never worked that way, and still does not now.

> The point of the Rwanda scheme is to make getting in the boat an undesirable option, because you'll just end up somewhere you don't want to be.

That's not the calculation they make. Their issue is being shot at, disappeared, bombed, or tortured if they stay. Most of the time their risk analysis does not go beyond leaving the country and you see quite a lot of them drifting from country to country once they are in Europe. The ones who show up at Calais are those who come from former regions of influence of the British Empire. No amount of dissuasion is going to change that.

> The hope is that few people will have to be sent to Rwanda because they'll stop paying people smugglers to make the trip.

It won't work and they won't stop. Again, these people take risks assuming that they have a chance of not being caught or to actually get granted asylum once they arrive (fat chance; most of them don't have a very accurate image of the UK). How is the British government paying to export them to Africa going to change anything in this calculation? Could the UK actually pay to deport all these asylum seekers? Could Rwanda actually welcome them in anything that looks like decent conditions? The most likely answers are "no" and "no", and the examples of Australia's refugees camps out in the Pacific are really not encouraging.

> Which does not work because to quite a lot of people drowning in the Channel is preferable to what they fled back home

But France is presumably a lot nicer tho?

I would not say that. Maybe a bit nicer, but they would not have the community effects they could find in the UK, where there are strong Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Iraqi networks. You would not guess from reading the British press, but there is actually a large population of migrants who stop in France, mostly from Africa though.

> but there is actually a large population of migrants who stop in France, mostly from Africa though.

I'd say the migrants that stop in France are from the French-speaking/former French colonies of Africa, taking advantage of the support network that already exists for those countries

Am I missing something fundamental here? What have London sweet shops got to do with UK government spending? Rents on Oxford Street, perhaps? Or is this a foreign key problem?

EDIT: I think the parent poster has added a last line to clarify, or maybe I missed it to begin with. Makes sense now.

The government needs to spend money on the judicial system, otherwise we can't prosecute criminals and society is infested with them.

The suggestion is that they are fronts for money laundering which would normally be investigated by the government (HMRC I guess?), but isn't being due to underfunding.

IIRC there was a piece in a recent Private Eye that investigated one of the operators of these stores. I seem to remember that they went into administration repeatedly owing VAT and other taxes.

As you say little or no official follow up to deal with the issue or stop it happening again.

I just read it today and it seems like they liquidate the company before accounts are due, thus not filing any accounts and technically not "owing" anything.

I don't see why they'd bother with VAT and attract more attention to themselves when they're already evading insane amounts of tax, and since they're not filing any accounts it's not like the 80k£ threshold (where VAT registration is mandatory) applies to them.

Thanks - interesting. Is it the really the case though that a company that trades for a few months and is then liquidated doesn't owe anything? Seems like a bit of a loophole!

Using pop-up shops as a front for grift of some kind is as old as the hills. In the 90s/00s it was tanning salons, then hand car washes in the 00s/10s. Nail bars, vape shops and those weird places with the feet-eating fish should probably also get (dis)honourable mentions.

Many UK public services are in real need of meaningful investment, but to connect that to this phenomenon without any kind of evidence is incredibly tenuous.

Some reporting from a few years ago to back up the assertion that white collar crime is rising as a result of reduced state capacity:

https://www.ft.com/content/8751e754-6e3e-11e7-bfeb-33fe0c5b7...

I would guess the situation has only got worse in the meantime.

So with the UK government debt to GDP ratio at its highest level since WWII, your proposal is to… increase public sector spending… and lower taxes?

There's an eye watering level of wealth at the top. Merely shifting tax burden a bit on to high end property would allow revenue neutral increased spending and lower taxes on the middle and working class.

It might help keep a lid on that crisis of unaffordable housing as well that tends to follow when an excess of £££ is sloshing around.

Perhaps we could do this with an NI increase that costs higher earners more, raising the NI threshold to benefit those on lower incomes, reducing fuel duty, and providing council tax rebates for those living in lower value properties?

> There's an eye watering level of wealth at the top.

the top 1% of UK earners account for 30% of all income tax.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/13/richest-bri...

... and could likely afford a good deal more with zero impact on their own standard of living

Needs the context of what % of total wealth they own though surely?

Top 1% of wage earners, on the other hand... arent actually that rich but are taxed a lot. In London that gets you a fairly modest flat.

The stratospherically wealthy dont have salaries they own yield bearing assets and have a much lower tax burden. This is where the real fat is.

Nonetheless to the average person it's easy to confuse the two groups.

No indeed, let us continue to double down on austerity, given its truly astonishing success so far

If you completely ignore the context of a global financial crisis in 2008 and pandemic in 2020, I suppose you might think austerity has been unsuccessful.

I'm genuinely curious to the reasoning behind austerity - I confess to not having any academic qualifications in economics but it does seem to me that deliberately removing services from the poorer sections of society is going to introduce more friction to the system, which will lead to poorer outcomes in general. The fact that our public debt continued to soar, even before the pandemic, seems to me to suggest that even on its own terms it wasn't a winning argument.

Do you have any sources that make the argument for austerity? This is a genuine question - as I say I have no formal background in the subject but from what I've managed to find I have found little in the way of convinvcing arguments.

Austerity is not a difficult policy to understand.

If your personal debts had grown exponentially over the past year, and your income showed no signs of exceeding your outgoings, would you not make some effort to reduce your outgoings?

This analogy is asinine because countries are not people. Their finances don't work even remotely similarly.

Please enlighten me on how people and countries differ in the basic concepts of having income, outgoings, and debts

For example, people don't tend to own their own currency. I'm sure you can think of other differences.

Does that mean the UK doesn’t have income, outgoings and debts?

It's much too reductive a framing, IMO. Public sector spending is not, majorly, an "outgoing" of "the UK" in any reasonably comparable way to an individual's spend - rather, public sector money generally funds services within the UK which employ individuals who a) pay income taxes directly b) spend their income in other parts of the economy, where VAT/corporation tax/etc feed back to HMRC, and companies profit and grow.

It's really nothing like an "I've spent £5 on a beer and now that fiver is gone forever" outgoing, in scale or effect.

Ah yes, the "maxing out the country's credit card" argument. The national debt is owed in £'s, which the government can create and destroy at will, and much of it is one arm of the government owing another arm of the government. It's nothing like personal debt.

Yes of course, the UK could simply print enough money to repay all its debts and that wouldn’t have any harmful or damaging effects on its economy whatsoever…

It's a good job I didn't say that then isn't it?

So what is your point? The UK cannot print its way out of its debts, so what’s the relevance?

Lowering taxes is counterproductive, though. The problem is sharing the burden with the wealthier. At some point, you can't really get something for nothing and we have to accept that if we want first-world services and infrastructure, we have to pay for them. And paying for them through taxes is way more efficient than just letting private companies extract their benefits from tolls and such.

I agree with this - I was making the point that austerity, by the terms of its own argument, hasn't worked. Reducing public spending has demonstrably not reduced our debt burden even before the pandemic, and so therefore I would suggest we abandon it.

Definitely, it was a resounding failure of the modern Neo-liberal ideas. What worries me though is the cakeist populists who are feeding on resentment and who are in power or close to it in several European countries (including the UK). There will need to be a tax increase, probably not for most people, but in terms of tax revenues.

The problem is that the effective taxation rate is unbalanced. Lowest income groups and new graduates are paying more than the highest income ones! Lowering tax on the majority of people need not lower tax so significantly if paired with higher tax rates at the top. Or so my understanding goes.

> austerity policies have cut back all public services to the point where they don't actually exist.

the data doesn't seem to show this:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-sta...

spending on social protection and health have been going up like crazy. almost 500 billion gbp in a single year on those two alone.

spending as a whole has been going up, now accounting for 51% of GDP.

> Close to 10% of the entire country are currently on an NHS waiting list

covid

> Meanwhile, the tax burden in the UK has reached it's highest point in 70 years

covid + nhs.

While the pandemic was an extraordinary expense that has to be paid back, there is no easy solution for the NHS. People are living longer and longer, and the required pot of money for running the NHS is getting bigger and bigger. Something will need to change, and I think it will be more private healthcare.

"there is no easy solution for the NHS. People are living longer and longer, and the required pot of money for running the NHS is getting bigger and bigger. Something will need to change, and I think it will be more private healthcare."

Couldn't a solution be to outsource to countries where healthcare is cheaper? Taking advantage of the cheap flying options like Ryanair or Easyjet...

As for immigration, why not use their (the immigrants) minds and manpower to deindustrialise agriculture and help turn England into a fruit and veg powerhouse... I mean the climate certainly has to have some advantages...

In immigration it's interesting that Denmark is pursuing a similar deal with Rwanda https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/denmark-talks-with-rwan...

Wasn't one of the reasons some people voted to leave the EU immigrants?

Chart 7.2 here is probably the most useful https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-sta... since it goes back further than 2019/2020.

You’re arguing about a 12 year trend from 1 years data

1997 onwards: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-sta...

The NHS is one of the cheapest universal healthcare systems in the developed world. There is an easy answer: pay closer to what many other developed countries pay per capita.

UK tax payers pay in the same ballpark as much per capita for unicersal healthcare as American taxpayers pay per capita for Medicare and Medicaid without getting anywhere close to universal cover.

>There are those who say these shops are a front for dubious trading, maybe even money laundering, and that some overlord is repeatedly opening and closing a selection of outlets to keep on the right side of business legislation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/london/comments/m3lh95/those_americ...

https://old.reddit.com/r/london/comments/cnkcaz/private_eye_...

I was expecting one of these links to be the link in the submission to be honest. The OP's link doesn't even ask the question as to why there are 11 sweet shops on one of the world's most famous shopping streets.

These pages are much more interesting.

It seems more likely that they exist for the same reason the numerous shops selling various small cheap items (phone box shaped fridge magnets, hats with "I love London", etc) exist.

It's a way to fill a commercial unit until a more permanent tenant arrives. So they shut down and reopen elsewhere because the situation was always temporary.

I support the money laundering hypothesis. Something similar has happened in Copenhagen, where you also see an unnatural amount of candy stores. There's been several busts related to VAT fraud, it can't be the only form of criminality related to it.

Just do the napkin math of what the rent is and how many sweets are bought in a shop, and the catchment of each shop.

For reference I had a look at a large restaurant unit in the suburbs. £120k rent and rates (local business tax) per year. That's £10k worth of sweets you'll need to sell each month, just to cover rent, and it's not Oxford Street in the middle of London. (My guess is rent on Oxford Street is a low multiple.) That's a thousand people a month who have to spend a tenner on sweets over 30 days, 30-odd people a day including weekends. Initially plausible, since there's a lot of footfall, but:

- Someone who buys sweets in one shop is not gonna buy again in another down the road. There's so many of these shops on and around Oxford Street.

- Most people aren't into sweets. Kids are, but they are only a small proportion of Oxford Street footfall.

- The shops have a bunch of staff too. Guessing minimum wage, but that will add ~20K per head per year when you add employment related taxes.

- Fitting the shop costs a few 10K.

- Sweets themselves cost something, probably not a huge amount compared to the sale price, but something.

Compare them to the Apple shop, which certainly sells enough stuff to pay rent. Their shop is constantly heaving with people, and their items for sale can cost thousands. These candy stores, when you walk by, are pretty much empty, and they sell something that can be satisfied for a quid.

Amsterdam has this with Nutella-pancake-waffle-icecream parlours and vacuum-packed Gouda shops (which displace actually good cheese mongers that cater to locals and visitors alike with a good selection of cheeses). Nobody really seems to know for sure, but it seems to be a combination of a shotgun approach to finding the golden location for a souvenir/tourist-experience shop and money laundering. These are, as the article points out, chains of shops with a murky web of owners behind it.

The Amsterdam municipality has stopped granting any new permits for these tourist shops now.

Synergies with crime are massive. If you can make the business almost work legit then you can pump the amount of money through the books by quite a bit.

At the same time if you are in a country where there's some sort of employment related benefit or you get higher unemployment after having worked, you can put a bunch of your gang on the payroll.

This happens all the time with other stores.

- Kebab shops who declares tons and tons of sales but nobody is ever seen entering the store and it's always empty. - China goods stores that are the same.

Classic money laundering for drugs and other illegal activities. I guess candy stores is the new thing.

It's not just in big cities either. My small provincial town has several shops and take-aways that appear to do no business at all. They're open for a couple of afternoons a week and never have any customers. There's a pizza place run by a single elderly man who gets annoyed if you go in and ask for a pizza (although he will treat you to a lecture about how wonderful Vladimir Putin is).

I would guess the sweets are traded internationally to have invoices that launder the money. Since the sweets never go bad, when the shop goes bankrupt, they can be resold to some other part of the laundering outfit.

If you're interested in learning more about money laundering, check out the Dark Money Files podcast. https://www.thedarkmoneyfiles.com

Yeah, and they can "sell" these candies off to other candy shops to make the books work (discrepancies between inventory; buying stock and selling products). If two of these just sell to each other then everything sort of adds up.

Exactly. Especially if this happens internationally, where they buy and sell at hugely inflated prices.

This is it in Amsterdam too, from souvenir shops stocking plastic garbage to stores full of phone accessories. It's known that these are all fronts, and somehow managed to survive the series of lockdowns. It's the big city alternative to cash-heavy biz like car washes or laundromats.

Maybe the rent increases have made these the only viable business models.

EDIT: The business models I am referring to are “dubious trading, maybe even money laundering”, not “candy stores”.

I think you’re being overly generous.

These shops are very very prevalent on Oxford Street, to the point of there being ten to twelve in the course of several hundred meters. They all have cheap signage, incredibly expensive stock and, other than tourists, very little footfall. They all look quite sketchy.

Only one point is 'off' though:

1) "cheap signage" - so they are minimising costs?

2) "expensive stock" - maximising profits

3) "low footfall" - this does seem odd

I still think that they get some deal on the rent, but they could also be dodgy at the same time. Would be nice if they were replaced by better shops.

The way it works (generalising, read links for better info) is:

1. The landlord loses his long-standing tenant during lockdown because they can't afford rent anymore.

2. Instead of letting the shop go empty, the landlord creates their own separate sweet shop company and effectively pays rent to themselves.

3. Towards the end of the tax year, the shop is declared bankrupt. The landlord can take some tax benefits for having a failed tenant who can't pay the bills.

4. Typically the shop would have to auction everything they own (signage, shelves, tills, products) to claim back money, but no one wants to buy American sweets at a business auction.

5. The landlord puts the sweets into storage (they have long expiry dates and don't take up much space) and repeats the same trick next year.

I meant “these” as in “dubious trading, maybe even money laundering”, not “candy stores”. Post edited to clarify.

Came here to make this exact comment. These are more than likely dodgy.

It just feels like yet another murky chain of property ownership.

How can these shops possibly sell enough candy to its target market of kids to pay the rent, when there are no kids on Oxford St.? Something from 'under the counter' instead?

Or just a case of the "landlord" filling it until someone better comes along because Westminster City Council absolutely have to make Oxford St. look like it's busy and bustling as it's allegedly the UK's most popular shopping street? It would lose it's reputation if it looked like any other UK high street, that is to say, full of closed shops and nail bars.

To be honest, it wasn't much different in the 80s and 90s. More major shops, but still lots of weird ones that had no right to exist on Oxford St. but were there nonetheless. In 2022, it's far more obvious.

The presumed target audience probably isn't children, it is mostly older teens and adult (British) tourists who may recognize American candy from social media and US films/series. But as others point out, that is likely just a front for money laundering.

I think that Westminster Council's needs and requirements on businesses and landlords on Oxford Street is probably underestimated though. But I agree, there's something really shady going here.

Oxford St is full of kids, probably one of the main places they congregate in central London.

Yes, I always wonder how many travel bags + souvenirs shops you need on street. On Queensway a pretty short street there are so many of these shops that it is getting ridiculous.

I live in Soho, and have watched these places pop up & shut down on Oxford St constantly for the last 5 years.

One factor is that in recent times these commercial rents have begun offering incredibly low rates for the first year, that then get increased in subsequent years. This makes it perfect for these low cost setups to move in, and move out constantly.

I do think that there is an aspect of money laundering going on. I've literally never seen anyone in one of these stores, so yeah.

Side Note: I got a weekly newsletter from Westminster council the other day, bragging about a raid they had done on some of those tourist trap places, and found £X amount of CBD products that weren't approved, non-sanctioned vapes/batteries etc. They also deported some undocumented people working there... These places are not the same as the candy places, but they are definately adjacent/similar setup.

How much would it cost to keep a place like this running for a month? Rent + wages, assuming it needs just 1 full time staffer. Their stock doesn't go bad very fast at least, so if they do pack it in they can sell most of it on to someone else.

That said, money laundering is pretty much everywhere; there's so many shops that don't really seem to get any business. Over here there's tons of phone shops, they sell phones, subscriptions (the provider is often plastered all over), phone cases and repairs, but I don't believe they get much traffic at all.

Why do you think it money laundering? What’s the exact mechanism?

Well, the usual scheme is you just report inflated sales, no?

I read a little further in the article and they mentioned that. Is it really that easy? I was hoping there was SOMETHING else besides just .. simple lying.

I had the same confusion before. I had frequently heard of money laundering and how casinos were frequently associated with it and thought it was something sophisticated. Unless I'm mistaken, it really is as simple as having a significant amounts of cash exchange hands under plausible pretenses and lying about it. For casinos, you can buy chips, cash them out, and the money is u traceable (or something like that)

> Why do you think it money laundering? What’s the exact mechanism?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhsUHDJ0BFM

Replace "nail salon" with "candy" and you're there. Candy is a great product for this because it's high-margin, and very low value.

Thank you! I think I was overthinking it a bit - looking for a deep, nefarious scheme when they're simply saying they sold 300 boxes of candy when they only sold 50, or whatever.

https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/cnkcaz/private_eye_...

It could be a similar to the technique used by trinket stores that was exposed by Private Eye.

Bubble tea shops are nice fronts for money laundering too.

I've actually seen people in those though, which doesn't invalidate it from money laundering, just makes it a less obvious one!

Perhaps women's clothing shops and pet shops are for money laundering too, since they have no direct relevance to my life.

Women's clothing, especially boutiques, are probably not a bad choice for money laundering if you could somehow pass knockoff stuff as genuine luxury articles, and have your dirty money come in as the delta between knockoff and genuine wholesale. Pet shops? I dunno.

I knew a pet shop in the US in the 90’s whose primary business was moving large quantities of weed around (bagged in the bottom of barrels of fish), so yeah, not impossible.

High end clothing boutiques aren’t cash businesses though, so they’re generally not good for money laundering.

Probably not - but there are "Sample sales" that pop up in abandoned store fronts that are certainly 100% cash, and I'm sure shady shit goes down in those. I'm too fat for any of those clothes, so I just judge from outside.

When you have 3 bubble tea shops within 100m in a town of 15000 where the basic wage for retail is basically $4000 (Switzerland) and a rent of $2000 + $50k without counting the cost to re-arrange the shop, with at least 2 staffs and no clients any times I walk by, I have no doubt about the purpose of these shops.

Selling takeaway sugar and caffeine with a high markup and a quiet shopfront isn't a new business model. Locating them near each other is just game theory. All of this is exactly the same as Starbucks.

Bubble tea started being sold in the West to appeal to Asian immigrants. So just because you don't use it doesn't mean nobody else does.

The bubble tea shop near me seems legitimate, you get loads of teenagers and Chinese students in there, they are really friendly and their products are good and high quality.

Where I am it's barbers, there are so many of them. I started going to one in lockdown as I had a big beard for the 1st time ever and it's nice to get someone else to trim it. He's a single guy from Iraq (even though it says Turkish barber outside). Very articulate and friendly. Unless he's from a wealthy family I can't see how he could get the money to come over and set up a fancy shop, pretty sure he's come over as an asylum seeker. I'm guessing he has been offered cheap rent for a short time, but he's still had a big outlay to set up the shop. He seems to do ok, but many of these barbers are empty most of the time.

Barber shops can have reliable clientele who come back once a month, high demand because everyone needs them, and a viable business model if the rent is not high - labor is $20 an hour, 3 clients an hour get $60 revenue, the difference can pay for rent and operating cost. $10k-$20k revenue per month is not too hard to do. (Of course that doesn't pay rents in super prime locations, so the cuts in Manhattan cost $50 instead of $20, but the principle is the same.)

> I do think that there is an aspect of money laundering going on.

Definitely yes, a similar thing happened across the pond in Amsterdam: https://www-groene-nl.translate.goog/artikel/ze-zijn-hier-zo... (Dutch article, used Google Translate)

Seems like every commenter here is aware of the money laundering hypothesis, except me... could somebody drop a link or anything to explain to the outsider what kind of money laundering is happening so profitably in those shops? Thank you!

Sorry, that's just conjecture on my part.

Sister commenter posted this about Amsterdam: https://www-groene-nl.translate.goog/artikel/ze-zijn-hier-zo...

Here's one from google about Scotland: https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/13308928.crooks-using-sw...

Here's one from PrivateEye (England): https://external-preview.redd.it/nI7Pl0eLeF1y4l6ow_QARxTZ09b...

Up until earlier this year I spent a few years working just off Oxford Street. It's amazing how much that street has changed in such a short space of time. Definitely feels a lot shadier now than it used to. While I'm not a big fan of most forms of shopping, it still feels a great loss to see what it's now become.

I worked for nearly a decade in Soho and moved away (from London and the UK) just before the start of the pandemic and before these stores I can remember the famous headset-mic-wearing-perfume-salesmen throwing out boxes of perfume to totally-not-in-on-it-plants. It's always had that kinda crappy tourist trap sleezy vibe that you'd find in any other big city to me.

That said Soho in general seems to have evolved with better restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, streetfood and smaller boutique shops whereas Oxford St didn't seem to read the writing on the wall when it came to the viability of large department stores selling things that people needed but could get elsewhere easier.

The section to the east of Oxford Circus has been like that for a long time. If the section to the west has gone the same way, that's a bit depressing (but as you say, not really surprising).

The department stores (Selfridges, mainly) are really the only reason to shop on Oxford St any more. The other high street shops can mostly be found in either of the Westfields, One New Change, Canary Wharf, Upper St, etc, where there's much less traffic and tourists. Or ordered online.

I remember the original plan was for many bus routes to be removed from Oxford Street once Crossrail opened. Is that still the plan? I can't see any recent news on this.

I believe local residents (and the truly woeful local council) resisted the change as it would mean buses going past their (currently relatively quiet) streets.

https://uk.fashionnetwork.com/news/oxford-street-pedestriani...

Oxford Street is also a terrible place to exist as a pedestrian – it's full of traffic, extremely crowded and just generally not very nice. I worked nearby there for many years and always hated it.

The only reason for braving it was to visit the big stores and when they went there was nothing left. Soho and Carnaby St are basically Disneyland compared to what they used to be, but at least they're fairly traffic free, quite nice to walk around and have good bars and restaurants.

Those perfume places were fascinating to watch. At least two or three of the crowd were plants, but they always had a big collection of tourists. Could never understand why people were so interested, or how the headset guy and his minions could maintain such excitement for knockoff perfume.

I work close to Oxford street as well, and yes, it feels seedy now, almost like in the 80's at times.

Generally, this is more "death of the high street" stuff. Visit the Bullring in Birmingham and one whole wing is largely devoid of shops.

The bullring was a disgrace in the early 80s.

It was a disgrace in the late 90's when I lived there as well - but they tore that one down and the current bullring was a different kettle of fish ... for how much longer though?

Money laundering on Oxford Street? Who could possibly be doing that?

looks directly across Hyde Park at the big houses and luxury flats with appallingly tacky sports cars out front

Oh, right.

It's not money laundering when it's rich people in mansions; it's tax evasion, which is what smart people do. /s

Not tax evasion, tax planning, you mean.

When I lived in London it was the Aberdeen Angus Steak House [0], never any customers despite being on the main thoroughfairs.. [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/4813176/Who-goes-th...

Iirc that was discovered to be a laundry in the mid 00s?

I feel like I have seen plenty of tourists eating there (and always felt sorry for them).

Rather than money laundering or anything shady like that, I always assumed it was just a fiendishly well-designed tourist trap. The branding is perfectly pitched to make it somehow look both classy and cheap (which are exactly the two things you want and need as a tourist in London).

I went there with family in the 80s as a kid. They weren't that bad, but you have to remember the standard of dining in the 70/80s uk was pretty terrible at that point. There were lots of people there and not much choice. At this point McDonalds was a new and cool thing in the UK and it was many years before things like Weatherspoons came and brought cheap, low quality dining/drinking to the city masses. I remember at that time chains were seen as being quite cool and fancy and the choices were bad pubs full of old men that didn't allow children, fish and chips or breakfast places.

I studied in London for two years out of by three year BA program (2018-2020), and due to COVID had to move back to Estonia to complete the last year remotely. Recently I visited London again to catch up with old friends and was really bamboozled by these "candy shops", they all had the distinct air of suspiciousness around them. I've never really liked Oxford Street however, even before the flood of US candy. Shopping malls are much better than high streets for actually buying things imho.

Oxford Street would be a much nicer environment if it were closed to traffic from TCR to Marble Arch, perhaps with a thoroughfare for Regent Street. It's been proposed many times over the years, but Westminster council are against it. If the street were pedestrianised, and furnished with seating areas, landscaping, and perhaps some small cafe/restaurant units in the former roadway, it would be a much more pleasant environment to shop.

>TCR

Tottenham Court Road

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottenham_Court_Road

The large amount of traffic going through it has to go somewhere. On top of that, given the huge number of pedestrians on Oxford street I’d bet that with restaurants spilling out it would just become an even more awful place to walk through. Any of then streets that I saw pedestrianised during covid actually became worse. Between tables, cyclists, and crowds congregating getting through them became more difficult.

Induced demand is a thing, make driving less convenient, and more people will take the tube/crossrail/bus.

There are plenty of examples of successful pedestrianised shopping streets, e.g. Stroget in Copenhagen, Buchanan St closer to home in Glasgow, La Rambla in Barcelona.

Doing some rough measurements in Google Maps, Oxford St is roughly the same width (if not slightly wider based on the samples I measured) than La Rambla. And our weather is marginally better than Cophenhagen and Glasgow, so one can't attribute success only to nice weather.

The traffic on Oxford St is largely bus traffic anyway, so I'm not sure induced demand is the slam dunk it might be in other areas. I am in favor of the pedestrianisation, mind you.

On top of that, induced demand is effected already by congestion charge/ulez.

It's up to the local council to allow (or not) outdoor seating for restaurants. Likewise for allowing (or not) cycling.

Plenty of cities have pedestrianised streets with a similar width to Oxford Street, and I find them very pleasant.

I lived in London pre congestion charge and learnt to drive there (I'd passed my test, but that's where I did most of the real learning). It would appear that the congestion charge didn't reduce congestion at all and was only a tax on tourists and the unaware?

Bamboozled means the shops tricked you, maybe you mean you were befuddled (confused)?

What made the blood of that area has been gradually removed and killed by having musical venues closed (Denmark street for instance) to make room for Starbucks and Primarks, so it is no surprise that sooner or later, there would be a bill to pay, which is exactly this: a soul-less street.

Agree totally with this. It's been exacerbated by the Crossrail work at Tottenham Court Road, which seems to have completely cut out the heart of the area - related to the issues at Denmark Street and elsewhere, like the Astoria.

And covid finally killed it. There’s what, two remaining music related shops there?

Denmark street was so good, cheap venues with quality bands like the 12 bar. Is it true that the music shops are moving out too. It was always on my must visit location when when I went to the West End.

These stores have popped up in a lot of major European cities. You should avoid them like the plague - regardless of their background - they are a complete rip-off. Often 10-20x the price of a comparable store.

You're exaggerating massively. They're expensive but 10-20x a comparable shop would imply they're charging £30+ for a chocolate bar.

Maybe not for individual items, but usually they are set up not for a chocolate bar but rather these giant over-sized "pick-n-mix" style candy where you put many in your bag. The price per 100g is definitely inflated as much as I suggested

I noticed something similar in Prague (Summer 2020) - I am single and have no kids so I had no reason to visit one, but I did find odd that there was such a large number of shops selling just extra-sugary stuff.

I am not 100% sure that we are talking of the same kind of shops, though. Here is what I mean: https://www.yelp.com/search?cflt=candy&find_loc=Prague

Yeah, there are more than one type of such shop.

I live in Prague. I am not Czech.

I do go the Old Town, [1] because I like it, it's pretty, [2] when showing visitors around, and [3] because there are good places to eat and drink there.

But in my experience, most Czechs never do.

But there are tonnes of junk touristy shops that no local would ever dream of going to, Czech or otherwise.

OTOH there are places like this:

https://www.candy-store.cz/en/

... not in the Old Town, in the New (Prague 2), which are a useful resource for foodstuffs from faraway countries that we immigrant workers can't get anywhere else. And yes, for some of them, we will pay inflated prices, at least occasionally.

So don't judge them all the same.

Saying that, some of my visitors to the city _did_ want to go to the Chocolate Museum and other touristy places in the centre. :-)

These places are often on business-rates-only leases. For the landlord, they're a cheap way to keep costs low while they wait for a proper long-term tenant.

For the tenant, well, cheap way to get a prime address to run a cash business, maybe....

Vacant property insurance can also be more expensive in certain locations as untenanted buildings tend to get quickly vandalized and have higher rates of arson.

Easier to just put a popup retailer in it on a peppercorn rent.

Should be illegal to have shops named "candy" instead of "sweets" in London.

It would seem rather silly and ironic for the British to adopt a prescriptive stance now. Candy has been used in English since about the 15th century, independent of the US.

The same applies to many other differences in which the British more often chose to diverge while the US preserved the traditional term, such as “football” vs. “soccer”, etc.

https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/2004/1028/p18s0...

I think this is a deliberate choice. The sweets are all American. As a Brit, hearing 'candy' makes me think of American sweets, hearing 'sweets' makes me think of rhubarb and custard.

Time Out did an investigation that suggests maybe they really are legitimate businesses making a profit, and not money laundering fronts as commonly suggested:

https://www.timeout.com/london/shopping/why-is-central-londo...

But I dunno, the sheer number still seems kinda sus.

Funny, they probably got the one that is the most legitimate-ish of them and ran with it

The whole article seems forced. But yeah the article is right in that it also works as a tourist trap

I don't know, sometimes these things run in fads. We had two car parts stores in my town of ~20000 people for years. Then new ones started opening in disused storefronts, until we had 13. They all closed after a couple of years, except for the original two.

Why? Maybe a magazine article about the best retail startup. Maybe a banker saw the numbers for such places were good and recruited folks. I don't know.

Its likely that they're a front for money laundering. It used to be Souvenir shops until that scam was broken up by the police and HMRC. Before that it was the auctions scams and the closing down sales shops. These shops are probably being investigated now, in a year or so we'll probably see a major operation to take down the people behind it.

Pandemic might have accelerated the opening of these shops but tbh Oxford Street has been like this for years, although mostly those shops selling trinket souvenirs and other tat.

Souvenir shops make sense for a city that attracts a lot of tourists, but when it's 5 shops all on the same street, it's a bit weird

"all the goods are unpriced".

I've run into this a lot lately.

I'm in CA and I thought we had laws against no prices?

Yeah this does not really sound legal. Or if it is, it should not be.

Especially if the candy still has American prices in dollars visible on the packaging (which would be doubly confusing for tourists there).

Could be money-laundering, could be something else. Whatever they are, they are no coincidence.

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