Ram raids in Victoria concentrate around a small set of retail formats. Each one offers a high-value, fast-grab payoff that justifies driving a car through a shopfront. The pattern matters more than any single incident.
The five formats that take most of the heat:
For the wider picture of where and when ram raids happen across Melbourne, our December 2025 piece on the data covers the trend in detail.
This is the section that trips up most retail tenants and landlords. The short answer is that it depends on your lease. The framework underneath, though, is consistent across Victorian retail tenancies.
Under section 52 of the Retail Leases Act 2003 (Vic), the landlord is responsible for maintaining the structure of the premises, the fixtures, and the plant and equipment in the condition they were in when the lease was entered into. The landlord's duty is to maintain what was already there when you signed. Installing new protective infrastructure that wasn't part of the premises is a separate question.
If there were no bollards in front of the shop when you took over the lease, no one is automatically required to install them now. The decision becomes a negotiation. The key factors are:
The practical step is to read your lease carefully, particularly the clauses on alterations, repairs, security, and end-of-lease make-good. The Victorian Small Business Commission (VSBC) is the first point of contact for retail leasing disputes in Victoria, and VSBC mediation is required before a dispute can move to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
None of this is legal advice. The right person to walk you through your specific lease is your leasing agent or solicitor. The point of this section is to flag the question you should be raising with them.
A retail storefront bollard line has one job: stop a vehicle from reaching the glass. Everything else flows from that.
The threat profile is narrower than it first looks. The overwhelming majority of retail ram raids in Victoria use stolen passenger cars or utes, not heavy commercial trucks. The stopping force needed for a 2-tonne ute at 30 to 40 km/h is a different engineering problem to stopping a 10-tonne rigid truck. Many tenants over-specify because they imagine the worst case, and many landlords under-specify to protect the budget. The right answer usually sits in the middle.
Three practical inputs shape the specification:
First Choice's commercial range covers three diameter classes, all built from 5mm steel pipe. The wall thickness matters: thinner-walled bollards bend or fold under impact rather than transferring force into the foundation.
| Diameter | Typical retail application | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 90mm | Lower-risk retail strip frontage, narrow pedestrian-priority shopfronts | Suited where the threat is opportunistic and the likely vehicle is a small passenger car. |
| 114mm | Most retail shopfronts, including standalone stores, strip-shop retail, and ATM-frontage retail | The standard commercial diameter for retail. Balances cost, visual proportion, and stopping force for the common ute-borne attack profile. |
| 140mm+ | High-risk formats (tobacco, jewellers, pharmacies in known target areas) and heavy-vehicle approach paths | Used where the risk profile or the approach geometry justifies a higher-spec line. |
Foundation method matters as much as diameter. A 140mm bollard set in thin concrete with no underground reinforcement is weaker than a properly specified 114mm bollard in a deep, well-tied foundation. For retail shopfronts in inner-city Melbourne and Geelong, the foundation method changes based on:
For more on how diameter affects safety performance, see our guide to different bollard sizes and diameters.
Bollards solve one problem well: stopping a vehicle from reaching the glass. Any bollard quote framed as a complete security solution should be read sceptically.
What bollards do not address:
Bollards are one layer of a broader security stack. For retail in higher-risk categories, the full stack usually involves bollards on the shopfront, security glazing or shutters, a rear-door upgrade, monitored alarms, and CCTV. The bollard line is the most visible single control and often the most cost-effective, but it is not the whole picture.
The retail insurance market is tightening on bollard requirements, particularly for tobacco, convenience, and pharmacy formats. Tenants in those categories without a bollard line should expect the next policy renewal to surface a requirement, an excess increase, or a coverage exclusion. The cost-split conversation with the landlord is easier to handle before the insurer forces it than after.
For tenants and landlords in Melbourne and Geelong working through this question now, the useful first step is a site walk with a manufacturer-installer who can assess what sits under the footpath, what the council will allow, and what specification fits the threat profile. If the right answer for your site is a security review across multiple controls rather than just bollards, we will tell you that. Book a site walk through our contact page.
