It's been a disturbing couple of weeks with news of break-ins at dealerships around the UK.
Firstly, you may remember we reported on this Weekly Update recently about the Newton, Wales branch of Freestyle (previously known as Wadhurst Country Services) that was raided on New Year's Day.
Sue Port told us at the time how raiders had smashed their way into the dealership through a wall, evading the alarms by staying close to the edge of the building where somehow the security system failed to notice the intrusion.
Well I was alerted to a similar shocking story this past week, where a dealership was targeted with brute force resulting in the loss of valuable stock.
The Bournemouth Echo reported how dealers Penn Lawn Mowers in Ringwood were targeted by thieves who broke through a brick wall in order to steal over a dozen valuable chainsaws. If that wasn’t hurtful enough, the paper reports how one of the saws was a very rare Husqvarna 562XP which is actually unavailable in the UK. Apparently, the owners' son was a collector who owned the rare piece.
The paper quotes Dawn Smith, who owns the business along with her husband Roland, as saying, "Things like this hit us very hard. It’s soul destroying when you work all the hours to have your own business and then things like this happen."
She goes on to explain how there were three males who arrived around 9pm and moved one of the outside cameras off its brackets.
“At around midnight, they managed to enter the property through the wall and get in through the gap," Dawn told the Echo. "The CCTV inside shows them shining a torch through first so they could decide what they wanted to get.
“It’s a shock this has happened. It’s never happened to us in the 16 years we’ve been open, although we’ve had people trying to do things over the years.”
The report then goes on to say how the local police are investigating but they are not yet linking the robbery to a similar incident which saw another garden machinery shop in the Bournemouth area ram-raided earlier in January
Ashington Garden Machinery were victims that time when four men used bolt cutters to unlock the gates and then reversed into the shop unit before stealing chainsaws and hedge trimmers.
I guess break-ins at dealerships are not a new thing. Depressingly, in the 16 years I've worked on Service Dealer these stories have always cropped up.
But why?
Do theives see garden machinery dealers as soft targets? Is the valuable equipment they can grab easy to sell on to the black market? If so, what steps can dealers take to protect themselves from falling victim to these crimes?
If your dealership gone through a similar ordeal, do you have any advice which may help other dealers? If so, please share your thoughts in the comments below. It would be wonderful to have less of these sort of stories in Service Dealer in the future.
