What happened
At about 4.20pm on Saturday 29 September 2007 Ann Dix was behind the counter of Phosphene, a party-supplies shop in Milton Road South, Stowmarket, Suffolk. A man with a scarf over his face and a hooded jumper came in and thrust a nine-inch carving knife towards her, saying: “Put the money in the bag.”
Up to eight people were in the shop, including a three-year-old boy. Dix refused. She had a knife nearby that she used to curl balloon ribbons; she picked it up and replied: “If you use yours, I’ll use mine.”
The robber stood in a daze, then repeated his demand three times. Each time she refused. He gave up and fled on foot across the street.
The outcome
Police arrived shortly after and inspected footage from a CCTV camera opposite. The robber was believed to be in his late teens. Suffolk Police handled the case as an investigation into an attempted robbery.
The pack holds one local-press report, dated 1 October 2007, and it records no further outcome. This page does not claim that anyone was charged or convicted.
What went wrong
The report records no employer system at all: no panic alarm, no second member of staff, no written procedure, no training. What it records is a decision made alone, in seconds, at a counter, with customers behind her and a child among them.
What the record adds is that the case is contested. Refusing a robber who is holding a knife carries a real risk. Her answer worked on that afternoon, in that shop, against that man. A different answer in a different shop, against a different robber, might not.
What it teaches
An armed robbery gives a lone worker seconds, and the judgement depends on the room, the weapon, the customer mix and the worker’s own read of the person in front of her. Survival is the goal. The law on reasonable force sets the outer boundary. There is no single correct answer a trainer can hand out in advance, and a page that presented this one as the answer would be teaching the wrong lesson.
What can be taught is that the worker should know, before it happens, what her employer expects her to do. Compliance with a demand, distance, an alarm and a locked door are all defensible answers. So, sometimes, is refusal. The failure is arriving at the counter with no position at all, and discovering it there.
Questions for the room
- Would your organisation advise a lone shop worker to pick up a knife when threatened with one? Where is that written down?
- A three-year-old was in the shop. Does a bystander change what the worker should do, and should it?
- How do you run this discussion as a judgement call without turning it into a how-to?
- What does a worker who has never been told the organisation’s position assume that position is?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed for the event, but the legal outcome is uncertain within the pack. One source was read in full, the archived local-press report “Fearless gran sees off knife raider” of 1 October 2007, held in the vault as an archive text file with no live URL. The quotations are the shopkeeper’s, as printed. Nothing in the record establishes a charge, so the page stops at the police investigation.
Our lone working training covers how to prepare a lone worker for a decision nobody can rehearse for them.
Sources
- Local press (East Anglian Daily Times, archived in the vault), October 2007 · “Fearless gran sees off knife raider”
Reviewed 20 October 2026.