Last Updated on: 27th September 2020, 07:59 pm
Ok, let me get this straight. A guy’s working at a Thunder Bay convenience store. A dude walks in wearing a black hoodie, a scarf around his face, and a big old knife and tries to hold the place up. By all accounts, the clerk disarmed him, and in a few stories, it says that he pulled his own knife and challenged him to a duel. The knife-wielding would-be robber ran away empty-handed, and it looks like the dueling clerk was fired. Why? According to some big wig at head office who watched the surveillance footage, the knife-wielding robber “didn’t look very aggressive.” Ok there Sean Sportun, you work the midnight shift and get greeted by a dude with a knife and see whether you would automatically say he wasn’t aggressive.
I get that things could have gone down a hell of a lot worse, and that it’s not a good idea to try and be a hero when dealing with a robber, but it worked out. Why punish the guy? It’s not like he beat the everloving snot out of the guy or something. Maybe the duel thing was justa distraction so he could call the police. Maybe where he was standing, the guy couldn’t get him anyway, but he thought he could distract him long enough to get police on their way. Hell, clerks have power-washed robbers and not been punished.
The strangest statement in one of the versions of the story was the reason he was fired. Sportun said employees were trained in the store’s robbery-prevention safety policy in which clerks give the robbers what they want and don’t chase or confront them. Does that sound like robbery-prevention, or robbery-encouragement? If I were a robber and I knew that if I went to this convenience store, I could get what I wanted, wouldn’t that encourage me to steal from them? Pick better words, bud.
Maybe I’d have more of an understanding if I watched the surveillance tape. But I think I’d have even more of an understanding if I worked the midnight shift and was greeted by a knife-wielding robber. Only then could I make a true judgment call.
