Burglars target cashless ice cream shops in Austin

Burglars target Austin ice cream shops

A bizarre string of break-ins left an Austin ice cream shop cleaning up damage, but not missing any money.

AUSTIN, Texas - A bizarre string of break-ins left an Austin ice cream shop cleaning up damage, but not missing any money.

What they're saying:

Zeds' Real Fruit Ice Cream says burglars targeted two of its Austin locations within the same week but came up empty.

"I mean it is a little bit laughable, you have a break in, and they don't take anything," said Mack Brown, co-owner Zed’s Real Fruit Ice Cream.

The New Zealand-style ice cream shop's first break-in happened at its Harvey Street location.

"We got a call from the Ring at about 5:15 a.m. saying our Ring was alarming. I wasn't sure why, so we went and investigated, and two folks broke in. They walked around, didn't take anything, they didn't even make any ice cream," said Brown.

The suspects broke through the back door before leaving empty-handed.

The following Monday, the same thing happened again, this time at the shop’s Terry town location.

"We had a fella come and shatter the glass at our front door. And then he proceeded to crawl around the store looking for things. And he was here for about a minute, two minutes. Didn't take anything again. And then crawled out of the store and booked it down Exposition," said Brown.

Co-owner Mack Brown doesn’t believe the two break-ins are connected. He says the business stopped carrying cash years ago after dealing with similar incidents.

"When Zeds first opened in 2021, there were a couple of incidents. There was a cash box, and it was stolen. So, the original owners decided to just get rid of cash altogether because they were tired of getting broken into. And so, we haven't taken cash since," said Brown.

Brown says more small businesses are making the switch to the cashless model because of the rise in break-ins.

"Having everything all digital is just much easier to handle in the grand scheme of things, but yeah, I think a lot of small businesses are, for this particular reason not holding cash in their stores," said Brown.

While the burglars didn’t get away with any money, the damage still left the business with costly repairs. Brown says both locations were able to reopen quickly and get back to serving customers.

"We're really fortunate in the sense that there wasn't significant damage done to our stores, so we're grateful for that. And we're just really grateful that we could open that same day and serve the community and continue with our day-to-day operations," said Brown. 

Brown says he’s now in the process of filing police reports with APD.