I first noticed London’s litany of gaudy US candy shops last summer when the children were pestering me for bottles of Prime, a sweet soft drink that was heavily hyped on TikTok and soon sold out. YouTuber Logan Paul was among those who promoted the drink online in viral marketing.
Kids everywhere started going nuts for the stuff. For a time, one of the few places that Prime could be sourced was in London’s conspicuous US candy shops that had, I soon learned, spread like a rash throughout the West End over the previous few years.
On one late evening family stroll we were dragged into a candy shop off the Strand thoroughfare near Trafalgar Square when the children spotted Prime bottles in the window. It was as if they had spotted Taylor Swift herself. My jaw dropped when I saw how much they were selling for – close to £15 per bottle. I knew I was being ripped off, but I considered it the acceptable price of peace.
Prime was a perfectly legitimate, if aggressively marketed, product that months later could be bought in any supermarket for a couple of quid. The drink had nothing to do with the US candy shops, who were capitalising on the hype. The shops’ owners bought up Prime from wholesalers and marked up the price to ridiculous rates to separate dumb, hassled parents like me from our cash.
‘I am back in work full-time and it is unbearable. Managers have become mistrustful’
‘Remarkable’ officer who was subject to court martial should be rehabilitated and promoted, says ombudsman
Gardaí search for potential information left behind by deceased Kyran Durnin murder suspect
Enoch Burke’s father Sean jailed for courtroom assault on garda
People are slow to forget when they have been ripped off, and from then on I bristled each time I passed a US-style candy shop in central London. I realised I was bristling with increasing regularity. Then I began paying attention to just how ubiquitous the shops were, and how dodgy they appeared.
The set-up was always the same. As soon as a unit became vacant on a high profile street with tourist footfall, a US candy shop moved in. Oxford Street, traditionally a prime retail area that was considered Britain’s high street, was particularly plagued – it had up to 30 of them before a recent crackdown. But the shops could be found all over the West End: Chinatown, Leicester Square, Covent Garden, and even in parts of Mayfair.
Their technicolour shopfronts and signage looked cheap and tacky. They all played pumping dance music. Their merchandise was invariably over-priced and, sometimes, out of date if you looked closely enough. They specialised in assorted US-style candies such as Jawbreakers and Jolly Ranchers, Oreos and drinks such as Mountain Dew.
Almost unbelievably for sweet shops that clearly targeted children, they almost all sold nicotine vapes as well as “designer” mobile phone cases, whose presence is rarely a signal of retailing exclusivity. These were sweet shops, but they had a sour atmosphere.
London city authorities had been fighting the viral spread of the shops since the end of the pandemic, with suspicions that some of them were engaged in tax evasion and money laundering. They had begun to spring up just before Covid hit. When pandemic restrictions wiped out many traditional retail businesses, even more of the candy stores stepped in to take their places.
Labour recently promised to bring in new rules to help councils incentivise other retail businesses to combat the candy store invasion
Westminster City Council launched a fightback. Council leaders said the candy shops on Oxford Street alone owed up to £8 million in unpaid business rates. When a shop became vacant, the candy stores would move in on cheap rents and a promise to pay the outstanding rates bills attached to the properties. Clearly, some never did.
Westminster’s trading standards officers began to raid some of the candy stores. They found many sold counterfeit confectionery or vapes with excessive levels of nicotine. In one shop in central London, they discovered that the pricey Wonka bars that it had been selling to tourists were actually supermarket own-brand chocolate bars that had been repackaged in fake wrappers.
The council authorities struggled to identify the owners of many of the shops, whose control was often concealed behind a network of shadow directors, shell companies and offshore shareholders. It was clear that many of the shops were controlled from abroad in dubious circumstances.
It became a hot political issue in Britain. Labour recently promised to bring in new rules to help councils incentivise other retail businesses to combat the candy store invasion. It also promised to deploy powers under the Economic Crime Act to tighten up identity requirements for people setting up such retail businesses.
The pressure by Westminster authorities has started to pay off – at last count, the number of US candy shops was said to be down by more than a third from its height. But there are still plenty of them left across the West End.
As for Prime, I recently spotted it marked down to £1.50 in one supermarket, barely a tenth of the price that I paid for it in a US candy shop a year ago. Sub prime, you might say.