Sam Kook

"It's very scary for us," says Sam Kook, who has been held up three times in the two decades he has run the Six Penny Variety at Bloor St. W. and Euclid Ave.

"One guy comes in, he has a gun.He ask me for money.I told him that today I didn't make any money.I gave him a pack of cigarettes and he left," Kook says, smiling and leaning across the store counter.

His store, which closes at 11 p.m., has also been robbed in the middle of the night, and with an insurance deductible of $5,000, he has no choice but to absorb the losses.

He turns serious."I've been here over 20 years and what happened when the cigarette prices went up, people go crazy," he says.

"You can't keep too many cigarettes here," Kook says of his store.So he restocks at least twice a week, making trips to the wholesale cash-and-carry warehouse before his store opens at 9 a.m. "It's a lot of extra work."
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Sam Kook, who trained as an accountant in Korea, worked in a Canada Packers factory for several years before he was laid off.
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One of Sam Kook's daughters is a minor-league baseball umpire and the other is a student at York University.