I’m being bullied by the shop next door. Help!

Aunty B is on leave. This article first appeared on December 16, 2010.

Dear Aunty B,

I have a problem. I run a DVD rental/retail store and I’m next to a pizza shop. The two businesses should go hand in hand, and for the first six months there was a lot of cross promotion and all was going well. The problem is that the staff in the pizza shop are causing a lot of problems for my store.

It all started 12 months ago (when we were six months old), when I had to list one of the pizza shop staff members with a debt collector because they had not returned a DVD and a game that they had rented, and were flat out refusing to return the rented items… 12 months later and the items still have not been returned.

This staff member then made threats of physical violence against me, and encouraged other staff members of that shop to intimidate me and graffiti my windows. The owner of the pizza shop doesn’t care, because his staff are all on his football team that he coaches. In fact, only this week the OWNER of the pizza shop made threats against my wife and myself as we were about to leave the store. The police don’t do anything except tell them that sort of behaviour is not tolerated.

The staff of the pizza shop have caused problems for other retailers in the area too, including graffiti tagging the walls of the laundromat three doors down, and breaking into the back of the bottle shop at the end of the strip, yet nothing happens to them.

I’ve considered intervention orders, but don’t see how they will work when the pizza shop is right next door to my video store.

The pizza shop staff all sit outside their shop and abuse my customers, and one of them has even gone so far as to visit my daughter’s place of employment and made stupid comments to her (she no longer works there).

I have a year and a half left on my lease, but out of fear for my own safety and the safety of my family and staff I am considering closing the store until I can find another location. Unfortunately this means re-building the business from scratch, and losing the many customers who have remained loyal to me.

What can I do? Who can I turn to for help? What legal action can I take, or steps to prevent them from being able to act in this way?

Help!

Dear Help,

First rule of life. Never fight with your neighbours. That includes neighbours over the back fence, office neighbours, shop neighbours, in fact any neighbours you can think of. If a neighbour wants to build an ugly fence, tell them it looks lovely. They want to charge you half even though it was their ugly teenage hoon that kicked a soccer ball against it night and day and caused it to collapse? Pay half. The office neighbor never cleans the toilet? You clean the toilet. We don’t choose our family and we don’t choose our neighbors, so we never fight with either. EVER!
So that is your new mantra in life. You don’t have to love your neighbour. You do everything you can think of to avoid conflict. This means being really nice to those pricks next door. That’s right. When you see them, you say hi.

You are friendly. If they are being abusive, you laugh it off. Take them in a big basket of free (old) DVDs and wish them a Merry Christmas. Tell them that Christmas is a good time to start afresh. Put on drinks for the neighbourhood.

Second, put everything aside, search for a nearby location and secure it. Your aim is to escape those arseholes as soon as you can. See if your shop could be subleased. Do whatever it takes. Life is too short to put yourself, your staff, customers and family through this.

Forget intervention orders or lawyers. Your best weapon at this point is being nice and getting the hell away from them as soon as possible. Their punishment for their abusive behaviour? Miserable lives, plagued by feelings of low self-esteem, trouble with the police and failed relationships. They’ll get what they deserve.

Move on!
Your Aunty B

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