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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 se
by lordnacho 5y ago
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.
- Freak_NL 5y agoAmsterdam 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.
- lordnacho 5y agoSynergies 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.
- christkv 5y agoThis 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.
- Veen 5y agoIt'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).
- blowski 5y agoI 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 https://www.thedarkmoneyfiles.com
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoYeah, 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.
- blowski 5y agoExactly. Especially if this happens internationally, where they buy and sell at hugely inflated prices.