For the second time in three months, police swarmed around Pacific CoastCom, which sells high-end cellphones and smartphones at a business complex at 3430 Brighton Ave., right beside the Burnaby NOW office.
According to store manager Dave Dudder, two men in their early 20s entered the store just after 1: 30 p.m. on July 21 and showed him a gun.
The men asked him to open the cage where the cellphones and smartphones are located, and, even though he complied, Dudder was pepper sprayed.
"It's a blur after that," Dudder told the Burnaby NOW that afternoon as he was closing up for the day. "We still have to take inventory on how much was taken."
After the robbery, Dudder was attended to by paramedics, who were pouring liquid into his eyes to try and get the pepper spray out.
Burnaby RCMP spent several hours interviewing Dudder and were also looking for witnesses in the busy business complex.
Police investigators stayed on the scene until 4: 30 p.m.
The incident came three months after an April 20 incident at the store in which five people were arrested in another botched robbery.
Dudder told the Burnaby NOW that the afternoon incident happened when he was alone in the store.
"We have wide open windows, and that was the first time (that day) I was alone," said Dudder.
Dudder said that in the 20-plus years Pacific CoastCom has been at its current location, it's never had a daytime robbery.
Now, in the span of three months, it's had two.
"We've gotten broken into, but at night," he said. "It's insane that this happened during broad daylight."
Dudder said new SIM card technology is one of the reasons people are targeting the new smartphones. With the older technology, phones and phone numbers were intertwined, but with the new SIM cards, all somebody has to do to "make" a new phone is replace the SIM card.
In the aftermath of the two robberies, Dudder is changing his tune as to what the future may hold.
In April, Dudder said: "We don't have much inventory on hand anyways, and what we do have is in the cage. . We can't be like a jewelry store where we buzz people in."
But now Dudder is saying two robberies in three months is too much.
"We're going to have to evaluate our security," he said.
"Two times is too many. I don't know how we'll do business in the future, but security is something we have to look at."
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