Goldthorpe businesswoman Cheryl Rose says that she is be scared her stock would be stolen if she was to remove metal shutters from her shop front.
The council has approached shop owners on Barnsley Road with a view to them removing the rolling metal shutters they use to protect their shops in the evening to improve the look of the high street and to encourage more window shopping.
Officers claim this would go hand-in-hand with the regeneration of the area but Cheryl, who runs 'Posh Frocks' - a dress shop that provides customers with bespoke dresses, believes the idea is ridiculous due to the temptation it would provide.
"Nobody would consider taking their shutters down around here. I've got thousands of pounds worth of dresses and I think they would all be gone after the first night," she said.
"I don't want to have a go at Goldthorpe because I have never been broken into here but we have not got a manned police station nearby so alarms would not help either. It would just be a smash and grab and everything would be gone."
The argument that sales would be boosted by window shopping when shut was also rubbished by Cheryl: "Nobody walks these streets during closed hours."
Coun Ralph Sixsmith said: "If we're upping the standard of the street and the street furniture and everything else besides then I think we've got to look at the shops as well.
"We've been up to Richmond and Northallerton and they have made a good job of it and it looked a completely different environment. It looks a bit like Beirut when you come through some of these places."
The council would also look to foot some of the bill if internal shutters were installed in the shops.
"We could put internal ones in, I know there's a cost behind it but we did propose to offset some of it through different entities," he said.
"We'd always advise shops in the area to use shutters because of the crime demographics. As far as we're aware the only suggestion of removing shutters would be to replace them with new ones," said a police spokesman.
