Ritchies IGA staff were held at knifepoint and a store was robbed multiple times by tobacco thieves, the independent supermarket chain’s CEO Fred Harrison has revealed, as the Coalition flags a major overhaul of the excise.
Mr Harrison told the “unbelievable” story during a doorstop address in which the Coalition’s Illicit Tobacco Task Force co-chairs Mary Aldred and Richard Colbeck announced further details.
Legal tobacco prices have skyrocketed to $60 for a pack of 30 cigarettes due to Labor’s excise, which has turned Australians onto the illegal packets which cost as little as $20.
The Liberal MPs attended a Ritchies IGA supermarket in Mount Waverley to promote the taskforce, which will seek to cut Labor’s tobacco excise by 80 per cent, alongside a “Swiss army knife” suite of policy options to drive down smoking.
Ms Aldred said the opposition was proactively looking to “smash the illegal tobacco market”.
“The only way we’re going to be able to do that is with a Swiss Army knife of policy options, including drastically reducing the tobacco excise tax, getting tough on organised crime, getting better coordination and having a legalised vape market,” she said.
Mr Colbeck said the 80 per cent excise cut was one of several “much more ambitious” measures aimed at reducing smoking rates in Australia.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data released in June found that nicotine consumption increased almost 40 per cent between 2017 and 2025.
This is despite population growth only 14 per cent over the same period.
Ritchie’s IGA CEO Fred Harrison said of the 85 stores in his network, the Mount Waverley outlet had been “hit six times” by robbers.
“On each occasion, robberies have occurred with machetes. We’ve had staff held at knifepoint,” he said.
“The stress and trauma and angst this has caused our team has been unbelievable.”
On one occasion, Mr Harrison arrived at the store at 9am on a Saturday after it had been robbed at 7.50am and was told by a police officer that they knew who the offenders were.
“She said, ‘Fred, we know who the offenders are. We know where they live. I’m doing the paperwork now. We’ll go around to their house this afternoon. We’ll bring them into the station. The bad news is by 6pm tonight they’ll be back on the street,’” he said.
However, Mr Harrison said he had become “really proactive to try and tackle this”, revealing he placed trackers in decoy cigarette packs to trace the thieves.
“A colleague and I came up with the concept of putting some air tags in some false packet of cigarettes,” he said.
“Those packets were stolen. The police came through and by 1am, 2am, 3am in the morning, we were able to track the tobacco back to a house in Cranbourne East.
“A group of eight was arrested and they were the absolute ringleaders of theft that had been going on in the area for a number of years.
“So there is a silver lining sometimes, but it’s just been so unfair on our team that we’ve had to put up with this now for so long.
“(It’s) great we’re doing something to bring this to an end.”
Read related topics:CoalitionTobacco Black Market