Police are looking for a man who brandished a boning knife at a young shop assistant in a botched robbery of a Napier dairy on Thursday night.
It's the third time the store on the corner of Creagh St and Te Awa Ave has been robbed in the last seven years, for a combined haul of little more than a handful of chocolate bars.
But each time the offenders have risked the possibility of up to 14 years in jail, the maximum penalty for aggravated robbery - weapons being used in all three crimes.
The chocolate bars were snatched as teenaged robbers armed with a pistol fled a Saturday night raid as a shopkeeper activated an alarm in August 2006. Four teens, aged 16 and 17, were arrested within a few days.
Nothing was reported stolen when a 20-year-old also wielding a gun tried to rob the dairy in July 2011, also being arrested within a few days, along with his girlfriend who had used a bank card at the store just moments before the Saturday night heist.
