June 28, 2004

The Tragedy of Kenny Kim

This was supposed to be Kenny Kim's time to enjoy success.

A Korean immigrant who arrived in Canada in the late 1960s, it was not long before he saw opportunity in a poorly run variety store at the corner of Queen and Sherbourne Sts.

He and his wife Soo Hae Ja bought the business in 1976 and for almost three decades divided their days — she opening the shop at 7 a.m. and he working from late afternoon until close at 11 p.m. Seven days a week for 28 years.

But a month ago, Kim, 63, decided it was finally time to sell. The kids, Jay and Esther, were launching their own careers. The mortgage on the condo in Etobicoke was paid off. He wanted to golf. Soo Hae Ja wanted to spend more time at the church. They were tired. It was time.

But before any of that could happen, Kenny Kim was killed. Ten days ago, as he was closing the shop on a Friday night, an attacker stabbed him several times in the stomach and left him on the floor, where he died in a pool of blood.

"By summer's end he was planning on being retired," Jay Kim said in an interview on the weekend, before going to get his father's store ready for reopening today.

"My dad was so close."

Kim's slaying comes at a time when many of Ontario's 2,400 or so Korean convenience store owners are feeling more vulnerable to holdups than ever before thanks, they say, to increased cigarette prices.

In the first five months of this year, 428 retail stores in Toronto have been robbed under the threat of violence, according to the Toronto police holdup squad. That's 28 more holdups than in the same period last year.

But many more holdups go unreported, says Jong-Kyu Huh, who owns a variety store at Queen and Bathurst Sts. and serves as president of the Ontario Korean Businessmen's Association, which represents 3,200 Korean-owned businesses in the province.

"The investigation in the store takes a long time, you lose the business," Huh says, so it can be more of a hassle to call police then not to.

And with so many shop owners, after decades of hard work, contemplating retirement, they don't want people to know they've been robbed for fear that nobody will want to buy their store when it comes time to sell, says James Lin, a former variety store owner and now editor-in-chief of the Korea Canada Central Daily, a Korean-language newspaper.

The only things of any real value at Kenny Kim's corner store, Huh says, were the cigarettes.

"(Robbers) know that the convenience store has money because look at the cigarettes that they have," he says. "A cigarette is like a piece of gold."

At about $66 per carton, cigarettes now cost more than at any other time in Ontario history. Many shop owners believe such high prices are behind these holdups.

Standing on tiptoe in the middle of his office at the Ontario Korean Businessman's Association, Huh demonstrates how four balaclava-clad men held up the night cashier in his 24-hour variety store.

"These guys come in with a gun and one pointed over the aisles with the gun, just like that," he says, reaching over an imaginary set of shelves, substituting his right index finger for the muzzle of a gun. "My cashier just ran out.

"It's on a daily basis, we have robberies," Huh says, referring to Korean stores in the city.

Three weeks ago he sat in a Scarborough coffee shop, listening to a shopkeeper who had been hit over the head while five guys raided his supply of cigarettes. The man's wife, watching from their apartment on a closed-circuit security TV, thought they were trying to kill him.

"This is his first time ever being robbed. He was about 65 years old. He was so mad about it," Huh says. "He was bleeding so much he couldn't see anything."

Huh recently saw the stitches of a clerk at an Etobicoke shop after a robber slashed open her palm with a long knife.

"Like this," he says, drawing the edge of his right hand back and forth across the palm of his left.

"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."

The businessmen's association wants to see the provincial government step in to help owners beef up security. "If they raise the cigarette price that much, they've got to raise security," Huh says.

At any rate, Jay Kim says, all variety store owners need to take more sophisticated security measures than the baseball bat or golf club hidden behind the counter.

His Christmas gift to his parents was a security camera, which he decided to buy after his mother was held up at knifepoint last November. But they never installed it.

"My Dad said it's not necessary. He'd be like, `I've been here 30 years, nothing can happen,'" Kim says. "Older generation Koreans, they tend to be a bit stubborn."

The goal for many in that older generation of Korean immigrants was to use the convenience store to establish their family in Canada, ultimately getting out of the business altogether.

Many came to Canada in the 1970s without a specific plan. Sam Kook, who trained as an accountant in Korea, worked in a Canada Packers factory for several years before he was laid off. Kenny Kim bought a nightclub that went belly up after a few years of business. Kim then started renting the convenience store and later bought the building.

Eventually so many Koreans owned convenience stores that they could help each other avoid the pitfalls. In 1973, several shopkeepers started the Ontario Korean Businessmen's Association, which allowed them to negotiate with suppliers en masse for cheaper prices.

Now the association runs three cash-and-carry warehouses in the Greater Toronto Area, trains owners in marketing strategies and plays an important role in the social lives of busy store owners.

But the second-generation Koreans, the children of those old-timers, have careers of their own and are not interested in inheriting the variety store.

Jay Kim is a graphic designer and his sister a student at Ryerson University. One of Sam Kook's daughters is a minor-league baseball umpire and the other is a student at York University.

"They see their parents stuck in the store all the time and not many of the second generation are getting the stores," Huh says, adding that the number of Korean-owned convenience stores in Toronto is dropping.

"I don't see anybody in their 20s doing convenience stores now."

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