Hold-up at Franprix

I was waiting at the check-out line at Franprix, the local supermarket, when two men in black—one wearing a hooded top that partially covered his face, and another, a helmet—entered the store. They quietly demanded the cashiers to open the cash register, putting what appeared to be guns against their necks.

At first I thought this was some sort of a joke. After all, what they had in their hands did not look like real guns, and well... it didn't look like a real hold-up; don't they usually tell everyone to freeze or something? In fact, most people in the store didn't even know what was happening and was going about their own business.

When I saw the store manager open the cash register and give it to them, and heard the alarm go off, I quietly went back behind the rack where they have chewing gum and candy, and crouched down. I stayed there until I heard the shatter of coins that the burglars left behind as they rushed out of the store, and the voices around me say that they had left. Then there was a flurry of voices—one of the cashiers accusing the store manager of giving them the money—after all, couldn't he see that they were fake guns? The store manager defending himself, and calling the police. People rushing in from outside the store, asking if this was for real; people inside the store, with shock and disbelief in their eyes.

What seemed, for me, quite bizarre was the speed with which business went back to usual. I thought we would be asked to leave, or at least, the store would close after such an event. But no, people continued to come in to the store and those of us waiting in line at the cashier continued to be served. Just before it was my turn to pay for my goods, a man came into the store to inform the store manager that the thieves had been caught a few hundred metres down the road. It so happened that the road that the Franprix faces is a rather heavily-patrolled road, perhaps because it leads to the only prison within Paris, or perhaps because it is close to a well-known mental institution. The two men must have just run into the police partrol car that happened to be cruising by.

I thought I had stayed calm during the event, but the stress must have been rather intense—by the time the men had left the store I had a bad ache in my tummy, and for a moment I was afraid I was going to start having contractions. I realized then that we are completely unprepared what to do in such situations. I remembered the earthquake drills we had every year (wasn't it in September, on the anniversary of the great earthquake of the Kanto region in 1923?) when I was going to primary school in Japan. Every Japanese knows what to do in the event of earthquakes. Granted that Japanese are more likely to encounter earthquakes in their everyday lives than people are burglaries, still, shouldn't we be better prepared for what to do in these events?