Most reporting on Melbourne’s tobacco arson wars has come from the police side — the press conferences, the arrest tallies, the taskforce updates. Far less has come from the people standing behind the counters. Our newsroom has spent the past several months speaking with retailers across the suburbs hardest hit by the campaign, and with industry bodies that represent them, to understand what the wars look like from the shop floor.
This is our plain-English account of what Victorian retailers, both legitimate and otherwise, are saying about the arson campaign, what landlords and insurers are doing, and what the industry is asking governments to do.
Two industries in one shopfront
It is important, before going further, to be honest about what the Victorian tobacco-and-vape retail sector actually looks like. There are two industries in one shopfront. There are long-established convenience stores, newsagents and milk bars whose tobacco shelf is a regulated, licensed, fully-compliant slice of their product mix. And there are dedicated tobacco-and-vape shops, often newer, sometimes operating on rolling short-term leases, whose product mix sits on a spectrum from fully legitimate at one end to fully illicit at the other.
The arson campaign has hit both. Some of the targeted shopfronts have been alleged in mainstream press to be selling illicit product. Others were not. Several of the most distressing incidents over the past two years have involved legitimate small businesses caught next door to a target, or family-run convenience stores whose only crime was their location.
The Melbourne precincts hit hardest
The geography of the campaign has been heavily concentrated in suburbs with dense, walkable retail strips and high foot traffic. The shopping strips most heavily and repeatedly hit, on the public count of incidents through 2024 and 2025, include:
- Sydney Road, Coburg and Brunswick;
- Hampshire Road and Hopkins Street, Footscray;
- Hampshire Road and Devonshire Road, Sunshine;
- Lonsdale Street and Walker Street, Dandenong;
- Springvale Road, Springvale;
- Cooper Street and High Street, Epping and Mill Park;
- parts of the Melbourne CBD around Elizabeth Street and Russell Street.
The list is not exhaustive. It is also not static — as enforcement and territorial dynamics shift, so do the targets. But these are the precincts where retailers we spoke with said the fear is most concentrated, and where the cumulative damage has been worst.
What retailers are telling us
Three themes came up consistently in our conversations.
The fear is no longer abstract. Several retailers told our team they keep their eye on the door more than they did five years ago, even during the day. Closing-time routines have changed. Some now close earlier than their licensed hours allow, simply because the late-evening trade in their precinct does not feel safe. Others have invested in CCTV, roller doors, fire suppression and reinforced glass — investments small businesses cannot easily justify on margin.
Staff are the people most exposed. Owners can absorb damage to their property. Staff — often casual, often young, often international students — are the ones inside the shop when something goes wrong. Several owners said the hardest conversation they have had in the past two years was with a staff member who quit because they no longer felt safe coming to work. One independent retailer told us they had stopped rostering anyone alone after sundown.
Insurance is collapsing. A small business owner whose shop neighbours a tobacco-and-vape store now faces materially higher building insurance premiums, and in some cases outright refusal of cover, because of the elevated arson risk on the strip. We were shown several renewal letters in which the insurer specifically cited the proximity to a tobacco retailer as the reason for non-renewal. That is a problem the affected business cannot solve on its own — it cannot move its own insurance risk away from a tenant it does not control.
Landlords pulling tenants
The landlord side of the picture has shifted in the past 12 months. Where once a landlord with a tobacco-and-vape tenant was simply collecting a higher rent, the calculation now looks different. A targeted shopfront is a building with smoke and fire damage. A repeatedly targeted shopfront is a building whose insurance is being declined. Several landlords we spoke with have either declined to renew tobacco-and-vape leases or have triggered breach clauses where they exist.
That is not consistent. Other landlords, particularly those whose properties are tied to opaque ownership structures, have continued to renew. The new state tobacco business licensing regime is intended to put more pressure on this side of the market — a licence refused on character grounds is, in effect, a vacancy the landlord has to fill with something else.
What legitimate retailers are asking for
The Australian Association of Convenience Stores and several Victorian industry bodies have been making a consistent set of asks of state and federal governments through 2025 and 2026. The asks include:
- Faster roll-out of the Victorian tobacco business licensing scheme, with adequate Consumer Affairs Victoria resourcing to enforce it.
- A clear framework for legal pathway-to-quit nicotine vaping, so that legitimate retailers can compete with the disposable-vape black market on price and convenience.
- Federal review of tobacco excise to consider whether the gap between legal and illicit pricing is itself fuelling the criminal economy — an argument we discuss in our economics piece.
- Insurance-market intervention — a state-backed scheme of last-resort cover for small businesses unable to obtain commercial cover because of proximity to tobacco retailers.
- Faster police clearance of damaged premises after an attack, so that uninvolved neighbouring businesses can reopen.
Where the legitimate trade sits in 2026
The convenience-store and newsagency sectors that were the historic backbone of legal tobacco retail in Victoria are smaller than they were a decade ago. Some of that is structural — declining smoking rates, the shift away from cash, the squeeze on small retail. Some of it is the wars. Several long-running family businesses we spoke with said they had quietly stopped stocking tobacco altogether, accepting the loss of margin in exchange for not being on a target list.
The dedicated tobacco-and-vape shop sector is harder to read. It has been growing in retail footprint even as it has been burning. Some of that growth is illicit demand pulling new supply into the market. Some of it is the price gap between legal and illicit product creating a viable shopfront business at the margin. The licensing regime being rolled out in 2026 will determine which shopfronts survive into 2027 and which do not.
What the public can do
The retailers we spoke with were clear that they are not asking for sympathy. They are asking for two practical things from the public. First, when an incident happens on your strip, report what you saw — Crime Stoppers takes anonymous tips on 1800 333 000. The taskforce’s ability to ladder up the chain depends on those reports. Second, where a small business near a targeted shopfront is genuinely uninvolved and has been hit by collateral damage, support it through reopening — foot traffic in the weeks after a fire is the difference between recovery and closure.
If you are a worker who feels unsafe at your shop, WorkSafe Victoria has a confidential advisory line on 1800 136 089. In an emergency call 000.
Reported by Mei Calloway, community safety.
