Hair salon owner Mikayla Goatley said there needed to be some type of "juvenile jail" for the youths who robbed her store last week.
"If you can do adult crimes, there needs to be some sort of punishment about it," she said.
"It's annoying that nothing happens."
Police said in a media release yesterday they had identified and located seven young people believed to be involved in the burglaries of three Gore hair salons.
Police said the youths were "spoken to" and referred to Youth Services.
Ms Goatley said what made the break-in even more of a "kick in the teeth" was seeing a video posted by one of the youths on social media pillaging her East Gore salon.
"In one of the videos she put on TikTok, she's holding a big thing and shovelling all the product into it," she said.
The salon owner said "thousands of dollars" worth of items were stolen after the windows of her store were smashed using a cement block.
The valuables stolen included hair clippers, scissors, dryers, straighteners, over 150 colour tubes, all retail products as well as the till, which was emptied and left by the roadside, she said.
She said she had to cover the cost of the stolen goods to carry on operating while she went through the insurance process.
She was not the only victim, she said, as she rents out her shop to three other beauty practitioners, all operators of their own small businesses.
Ms Goatley said she wished some of the parents of wayward youths had come to her business to apologise or brought their children round to say sorry, like in the "old school days".
Eastern Southland Neighbourhood Support area co-ordinator Karen Bellew said the spree, although serious, seemed to be a one-off event.
She said the group received weekly crime reports from police that showed no evidence the offending was an ongoing pattern.
