What would you do with £100,000? Invest in your business? Upgrade your premises? Support your community?
One shop owner in Wolverhampton had no choice. Instead, they forfeited over £100,000 in fines, costs, and surcharges after being caught selling oversized vapes, illicit tobacco, and cigarettes – including sales to schoolchildren.
At a hearing in August 2025, Honey Mini Market, trading as Warstones Mini Market, and its director pleaded guilty to multiple offences under tobacco, vaping, and child protection laws. Trading Standards officers uncovered a mass of illicit cigarettes, non-compliant vapes and an underage sale made to a 16-year-old volunteer.
The penalties were severe: over £100,000 in fines for the company, £2600 in fines and a 12-month community order for the director.
Despite legislative changes and stories such as these circulating the media, this is not an isolated case. In August 2025, Trading Standards seized £35,000 worth of illicit vapes from a shop in Westminster. A recent report also revealed that one in five shops tested in Scotland were found selling vapes to under-18s, resulting in hundreds of individual penalties.
The message from authorities is clear: enforcement is intensifying. Disposable vapes are already banned, and it’s clear to see that Trading Standards teams across the UK are stepping up covert test purchases, raids, and prosecutions.
For retailers and operators, the risk is stark. A single underage sale, a single non-compliant product, can trigger fines that devastate a business and damage its reputation beyond repair.
That’s where Serve Legal comes in. We are the UK and Ireland’s leading provider of compliance auditing, with a nationwide network of trained auditors who carry out underage sales test purchase, vape and tobacco compliance checks and tailored audit programmes for your sector.
Serve Legal is trusted by retailers, hospitality operators, and service providers nationwide because we keep compliance simple. Our pricing is transparent, our programmes cover every stage from testing to reporting, and our independent audits provide credible evidence that businesses are meeting their legal responsibilities. For many clients, that reassurance is the difference between confidently operating day to day and living in fear of a Trading Standards inspection.
The question is not whether Trading Standards will investigate businesses selling age-restricted products – it’s when.
What would you do with £100,000? Lose it in legal costs and fines… or invest a small portion in compliance now and protect your business?
Submit your audit programme request through our website and let us do the rest.