Hafize Sahim: Walking Tall

With all the sundry low wage jobs I held in my youth, I never worked in any sort of on-your-own retail establishment. My retail jobs were in department stores - Filene's and Jordan Marsh - we're there was plenty of risk of running into a scam artist ("I gave you a twenty...") or a shoplifter. (I turned my back once at Jordan's and someone swiped a pretty expensive fountain pen. My supervisor lauded me for being so upset, attributing it to my being so protective of Jordan's interests. In truth, I was really ticked off that I had been duped by such an obvious trick: "I'd like to see that pen on the top shelf.") This was, I supposed, as much a function of there being far fewer 24/7 convenience stores in the good old days and, thus, far fewer opportunities to be clerking on your own.

One summer, my sister Trish did have one lulu of a retail job. She was often the one and only clerk in an entirely low-rent surplus store: fall-apart shoes for two bucks, fall-apart plastic kitchen gizmos for 99 cents. The store was owned by a low-rent Worcester wise guy who ended up doing time for his higher-end surplus business: selling hot goods (IBM Selectrics, fox-collar coats) that fell off the truck. The store Trish worked in may have been the front for that business, as there were seldom any shoppers and we were always scratching our heads trying to figure out how Route 9 Surplus stayed in business.

(Ah, those were the days when high school and college kids took any job that paid, without one scintilla of thought given to how it was going to play out on a résumé. These jobs were, in truth, excellent training ground for learning how to get along with all sorts of people, not the least of which was irrational, irascible managers; learning how to withstand boredom and drudgery with humor; and learning what you didn't want to do with your life.

A long way of introducing the story of one Hafize Sahim, the plucky Long Island store clerk who was on the news earlier this week after she warded off an armed convenience store thief by going after him with an ax.

In the AP article on her bravery (or foolhardiness), which appeared in the The New York Post (which I'm amazed didn't make far more of this story, which strikes me as right up their editorial alley), Ms. Sahim's height is given as 5'4". When I heard about her on the news, however, her vitals were given as 5' 90 pounds. From the picture, that looks closer to right.

The suspect entered the South Convenience store shortly after 8 p.m. Saturday, wearing a mask and demanding money.

The clerk - 5-foot-4 Hafize Sahim (Ha-feeze Sa-HEEM) - retrieved the ax from under the counter and began swinging it, chasing the man out of the store empty-handed.

The 27-year-old Sahim told reporters Tuesday that she thought the gun was a fake, which is why she fought back.

As she put it: "I said to myself, 'I'm not giving him money.'"

Now, we may all argue that Ms. Sahim was imprudent in going after a gunman with an ax, and that if he had fired, she would be a statistic not a heroine.

Pondering the mortality rates of retail workers, I found some heartening information from the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS):

The total number of convenience store fatalities in 2006 dropped 17 percent compared to the year prior, a far greater decline than the 0.5 percent drop registered overall in the workplace, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) annual report, The National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2006.

Athena Research Corp. Research Associate Sandra Erickson and President Dr. Rosemary Erickson provided NACS with key findings of most relevance to convenience and petroleum retailers:

• Convenience store homicides decreased by 17 percent from 42 in 2005 to 35 in 2006.
  
• Gas station homicides decreased by 5 percent, from 41 homicides in 2005 to 39 in 2006.

While these declines may have nothing to do with "trends" and everything to do with "random", it's nice to know that, at least for last year, it was not quite so dangerous to work in a convenicence store or gas station. And it's nice to know that Ms. Sahim will not be among their number - even though she absolutely put herself at risk. According to the Athena analysis cited on the NACS website, violent crime goes down when convenience stores make steps that include "training employees in safety and anti-violence measures."

Perhaps Ms. Sahim was absent that day.

As I recall the TV spot on this incident, which included an interview, our heroine is an immigrant.

There is something quite wonderful about the redoubtable Hafize Sahim saying to herself "I'm not giving him money." Something frontier, hell-no, walking tall. Wielding her ax, wearing her headscarf, Ms. Sahim may look like the woman on the Old Dutch Cleanser can, but she more closely resembles a mini-version of Buford Pusser, whose heroics (and madness) were made famous by the execrable Walking Tall films of the 1970's.

But Hafize Sahim is no vigilante. She is not taking justice into her own hands. She has not deputized herself to lead the posse against the bad guys.

She is, instead, standing up. She's not taking it. She's not letting someone push her around, even at gunpoint.

In these dark days when we seem to forget that we're a nation of immigrants, when we forget to remember that all Muslims aren't terrorists, how American is that?