Another says a group of teens were seen "stuffing stuff in their pants" in front of another customer, amid concerns theft from the city’s bottle stores appears to be on the rise.
LiquorLand Andersons Bay owner Chris Hart said the incidents were "frustrating", "very annoying" and a "huge cost to the business".
"These young people just do not give a rat’s a....
"They’ve got no respect whatsoever, absolutely zero respect for anybody’s houses, belongings, or goods or business."
The store announced in a post on social media this week it had "come to the end of our tether" and had "no choice" but to set its own entry conditions.
Customers would be expected to leave their bags at the counter and those who looked under the age of 30 might be asked to produce ID.
They would also ask people to pull their hoodies down, Mr Hart said.
The move was sparked after young people, aged from 15 to 17 and sometimes in groups of up to four, had been picking up products and running out of the store.
Over the past six months, Mr Hart estimated he had filed about five police reports — mainly at the Andersons Bay Rd premises along with his Great King St store.
Shoplifting at the Andersons Bay Rd store did not happen a lot, but had become "more frequent" over the past few months.
The police were doing a "decent enough job", but bottle store thefts were not high on their agenda.
"It started in Auckland with ram-raids and that sort of behaviour, and then it crept down to Christchurch and now it’s approaching Dunedin pretty quickly."
Bottle-O Hillside owner Michael Sumner said there had been three instances of shoplifting at the store this school holidays — more than the past couple of years combined.
It tended to be the same young people over and over again, and another theft was attempted on Monday.
The youths, primarily under the age of 18, were "brazen" and "doing their very best to be devious", he said.
They would distract staff, go for $70 to $100 bottles of vodka and try to stash as many as they could.
He recalled three young people taking four bottles "pretty much right in front of another customer".
"They were stuffing stuff in their pants and up their shirts."
He "absolutely" believed shoplifting was on the rise in bottle stores in Dunedin, and that teens thought they could get away with it "because they’re coming for a second and a third time. It’s not a one-off and never see them again.
"It’s these same kids and the same faces, and they’re all trying it on."
While he understood the difficulty for police with allocating resources, Mr Sumner said he was "frustrated" they could not do any more than they were already doing.
Otago coastal prevention manager Inspector Sam Ramsay said Dunedin police were concerned any time they received a report of youth offending, and were committed to locating offenders and holding them to account wherever possible.
