Inside the Wave of Violence Shopkeepers Have Faced During the Pandemic

The day before the first COVID lockdown began, Anita Nye was attacked at work. A dispute over the number of milk bottles a customer could buy due to shortages at the start of the pandemic ended with Nye being shoved, falling and smashing her head on the store’s fridge. “His parting words to me were ‘I hope you fucking die of COVID’,” she says. “It was just over milk.”

It was the first in a long line of threats, verbal abuse, and physical attacks that have increasingly defined the pandemic for this convenience store owner from Orpington, southeast London. She now faces insults like “whore” and “cunt” or threats of violence on a daily basis, while she and her husband have been physically assaulted three times since. On one occasion, a 13-year-old girl attacked Nye for asking her to leave the shop. On another, her husband was head-butted before being dragged into the street and beaten.

Nye is just one of countless workers at British convenience stores and corner shops – small convenience stores equivalent to bodegas in New York – who have been facing a tidal wave of abuse during the pandemic. A survey for trade union Usdaw found that 88 percent of shop workers had experienced verbal abuse, 60 percent had been threatened and 9 percent had been physically assaulted in 2020. 79 percent said the abuse was far worse than in 2019, which was itself a record high. In corner shops the problem is even worse. The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) recorded 1.2 million incidents of abuse over the last year in the sector.

There’s a racist element to this abuse too that can’t be ignored. A huge number of corner shops in the UK are run by the South Asian community, who the ACS says now regularly face racism at work. Nye tells me the co-owner of her corner store, 66-year-old Raju, has been called a deeply offensive slur directed towards people of South Asian/Pakistani descent while at work on several occasions. “The racist abuse being experienced by shop workers is just awful, it’s stomach-turning,” says Daniel Johnson, a leading campaigner on shop workers’ rights and a member of the Scottish Parliament for Labour. “People who have just sought to establish a living for themselves and their families are treated to this barrage of abuse, violence and racism.”

Just a few weeks ago, a family of three attacked her for enforcing shop rules. They surrounded Nye without masks, repeatedly called her a “cunt” and threatened her before eventually grabbing and shoving her. “I was crying, but it was tears of frustration because you want to fight back but you can’t,” she recalls. 

Nye says staff are now equipped with body cams to record future attacks. “You just feel like you are on your own. It makes you reevaluate everything,” she says. “I’m not saying that people don’t care but it’s gutting. You just feel like you’ve done it all for nothing.” After starting at the age of 14 and working for 36 years in the same store, she tells me her and her husband are now considering leaving the industry altogether.

Despite seeing increased revenue – independent convenience stores saw a 63 percent rise in sales in the first three months of the pandemic – workers in these stores have never felt less safe. “We are facing a situation where they expect to be abused at work,” says Labour’s Johnson.

The reasons why these institutions are facing an overwhelming flood of abuse is complicated. One factor is COVID regulations. Particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, corner shop workers were conscripted to enforce various new and unfamiliar rules, from mask wearing and social distancing to rationing of items, and rarely have the power, authority or support to follow through. Campaigners say adding those rules to a society where lockdowns have left people increasingly on edge and an industry without enough safeguards, has been a huge driver of abuse.

“If you’re a Tesco you probably have staff on the door. You have CCTV and security systems. You have lots of staff around and lots of customers. Convenience stores have none of that,” says Chris Noice, communications director at the ACS. Combine that lack of security with a perceived lack of authority and the fact lockdowns made more people use local stores, and you have the recipe for dangerous levels of abuse.

For some of those going through this, the reasons run deeper than just COVID. “You always get treated like you’re nothing, like second class citizens. As if we’re not clever enough to get a job elsewhere,” says Michelle Whitehead, a Wolverhampton-based convenience store worker of 19 years. She tells me that the way shop workers are taken for granted has only gotten worse during the pandemic, despite the vital role they have played keeping everyone fed.

Whitehead tells me that the now daily abuse she faces is far worse than at any point in her career. She describes being spat on, shouted at and having a basket full of food thrown at her head. “Only two months ago, I was threatened by a customer punching the glass and counter. He told me he would wait outside work for when I finished, he would hold me down and beat me up,” she recalls.

After months of facing abuse day-in-day-out, the impact of that cumulative trauma is devastating. “I have come home and cried,” she tells me. “Each day it chips and it chips and it chips away at you.”

“I worked in retail before being elected and I came from a shopkeeping family,” says Labour’s Johnson. “I’ve long felt that shop workers are undervalued. I think it’s shocking that attitude persists despite how apparent it is that we depend on them.” That lack of respect may go some way to explaining why this isn’t something entirely new to COVID – Usdaw and the ACS had recorded albeit smaller rises in abuse towards shop workers for years before the pandemic hit.

All the workers VICE World News spoke to described multiple occasions when police didn’t show up, and even when they did, it often was too late to deal with it. Even if they do arrive, assaults are often only classified as a crime if they cause serious injury or are committed by a repeat offender. Many felt the system was broken and were deterred from ever reporting crimes. “You just think, what’s the point,” as one put it. It’s only made worse by the fact the lack of reporting means that it is left to groups like the ACS and Usdaw to measure the scale of the problem to try and prove to police forces that it’s worth dealing with.

Johnson introduced a bill in the Scottish parliament which became law, creating a specific crime of assaulting a shop worker in the line of duty, similar to protections we have or plan to have for emergency service workers and even tax inspectors.

A petition from Usdaw for a similar UK-wide law was one of the fastest growing petitions on the government’s website, but Downing Street rejected the demand, saying, “The government is not persuaded that a specific offence is needed as a wide range of offences already exist which cover assaults against any worker, including shopworkers.”

“The government’s idea was that the law was sufficient and they don’t need to make changes, which was really difficult for the shop workers who have been experiencing this to hear,” says Noice, the ACS representative.

But reforms to policing and laws are only “half the solution” according to the ACS. From reversing cuts to social care to more community interventions, there are a variety of policies they say would reduce the underlying causes.

What could be the most scary thing about the abuse faced by shop workers is that while not everyone will be violent, the perpetrators could be anyone. “When someone stands in front of me I do start to wonder, am I getting abused today? Will they thank me or threaten me?,” says Whitehead.

 “When you’re getting this on a daily basis it has such an effect on your wellbeing. It’s just draining,” says Claire Saunders, who runs a convenience store in Romford, east London. “People are risking their health to provide an essential service, and to face this constant abuse, well it’s a kick in the teeth.”

The daily abuse she faces ranges from being sworn at for asking people to socially distance to being pushed to the ground. One customer threatened to spit on her and give her COVID, echoing an incident prior to the death of station worker Belly Mujinga in April 2020. Another told Saunders they were going to rape her. It got to the point where she stopped wanting to come to work – “you shouldn’t have to feel like that every day”.

While much of society prepares for the easing of lockdown, the end is far from in sight for corner store workers. The government has stressed that rules like mask wearing that have been flash points for violence will continue for months. Everyone VICE World News spoke to expressed fears that keeping rules in place without more support for staff will only make the problem worsen. Many have lost hope of help ever coming.

“We’ve been campaigning about this since 2000. Sometimes you just think ‘what’s the point’,” says Whitehead. “The last 12 months have been the worst ever recorded and still nothing gets done.”