I stepped between them and tried to explain<\/a>, as calmly as I could, that we had a legitimate reason for stepping into the shop on London\u2019s most prestigious street and asking questions.<\/p>\n\u201cDon\u2019t f***king film me,\u201d he continued to shout, twisting his body in an attempt to try and face him down.<\/p>\n
We thought this place might have a problem with journalists showing up, but even then, the level of aggression was fiercer than I expected.<\/p>\n
Just over a year earlier, a team of police and trading standards officers had raided the premises after a couple of tourists were charged \u00a3800 for two bags of sweets.<\/p>\n
Staff in the store had fled when the authorities arrived and it turned out they had good reason for making a getaway.<\/p>\n
Officers searching the premises discovered that the door to a secret underground passage was hidden behind a wall of t-shirts. The tunnel was stashed with thousands of allegedly counterfeit goods with a street value of over \u00a380,000.<\/p>\n
One of the things we wanted to know when we walked in the door was why just over 12-months later one of the directors connected to the business when it was raided was stilll listed as having an active company at the same address.<\/p>\n
But the first sign of our camera and mention of the man\u2019s name sent the shop worker behind the till into a frenzy.<\/p>\n
Eventually, a calmer colleague stepped in and claimed the director still linked to the address had disappeared. The landlord, he claimed, was even trying to find him.<\/p>\n
What he didn\u2019t have an answer to was the broader question we\u2019d come to Oxford Street to find out: why do so many business on the UK\u2019s prime retail destination keep going bust and popping up again?<\/p>\n
![\"Zak](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PRO-RES-NO-MUSIC-LOGO-GFX-SFX-Sweet-Shop-Invasion-poster-22-7005204.jpg\" "\\"Zak")
<\/p>\n
Our team were shocked by the aggression from one American candy shop worker in London (Image: Daily Express)<\/p>\n
Several investigations have suggested the pattern is linked to tax avoidance, with a whopping \u00a39m lost in business rates alone, Westminster Council reported back in 2023.<\/p>\n
Three years later, our experience on Oxford Street does little to contradict the idea that business in these establishments is being done in bad faith.<\/p>\n
We found, on the lower end of the scale, constantly absent and somehow always unnamed managers, that staff deferred to for all of our questions. These retail leaders were not only perennially off-site, they were also overseen by even more anonymous owners.<\/p>\n
This lack of transparency isn’t just about avoiding customer accountability; it\u2019s a strategy to obscure ownership and evade tax obligations.<\/p>\n
Employees claimed either not to know or simply refused to say who the proprietors of these places were and in several of the shops the official company name, which legally must be on display for the general public, was not visible.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s almost like they deliberately didn\u2019t want people to know who was behind the operation.<\/p>\n
The most ludicrous explanation a shop came up for not letting customers see who they were actually doing business with was in Harry Potter-themed shop Wizards and Spells.<\/p>\n
There appeared to be magic at work on the piece of paper with the company name that had apparently been pinned to the wall because when I challenged an employee about why it wasn\u2019t on display he said it had fallen off the wall, into a cellophane folder and leapt into a closed drawer a metre or so from where it had been.<\/p>\n
The absurdity of that encounter was just a precursor to the real aggression we faced elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The videographer and I were merely walking past with our equipment when the two men loitering in the store started giving us eyeballs in an attempt to intimidate.<\/p>\n
I immediately found this suspicious and decided to go ask why they were acting this way. As we headed round the corner to set up, one of the men followed us and appeared to film us on his phone.<\/p>\n
He ran back into the store and, as we approached, saw him changing into a security vest. After initially letting us walk in he became very aggressive in our question about who owned the business. He started thrusting his phone in our faces saying he would \u201cfind us\u201d and that the footage was for his unnamed \u2018boss.\u2019<\/p>\n
His ID card had been turned the other way and when I challenged him about this, the man claimed he didn\u2019t need to show it because I wasn\u2019t a representative of the Security Industry Association.<\/p>\n
The law states that licensed security staff must display their credentials at all times except in exceptional circumstances (like being undercover). It was clear the man and the business had something to hide.<\/p>\n
And he was far from alone. As we worked our way down the road we found similar behaviour across the board. We were met with threats, insults and attempts at intimidation.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve got to admit I was kind of surprised. I\u2019m used to having people not want to answer my questions or even get angry.<\/p>\n
But business owners and staff tend to be conscious of the environment and the impact coming across as a violent thug might have on a potential customer.<\/p>\n
When we visited Accrington a few months ago on a similar brief there was none of this naked aggression.<\/p>\n
So what does it say that those working on London\u2019s most famous street showed no concern for behaving in such a way?<\/p>\n
I think it shows knock-off goods and tax evasion is just the start and that we\u2019ve got a very serious problem.<\/p>\n
The fear is that, if we can\u2019t tackle it here in the capital\u2019s prime retail destination, what hope do we have of being able to smash it across the rest of the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zak Garner-Purkis investigated London’s American Candy shops (Image: Daily Express) The angry Oxford Street shop worker lunged towards…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[26],"tags":[33045,33046,61,1613,4154,27,9219,33047],"class_list":["post-72432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-american-candy-shops","tag-counterfeit-goods","tag-crime","tag-fraud","tag-high-street","tag-london","tag-oxford-street","tag-tax-evasion"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116831914070382585","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n