beer and punishment

For the benefit of our younger readers who may not have heard about it. If you’ve just put in a hard day doing whatever it is you do, you’re headed to the off license on your way home and you don’t have any ID on you then you soon may be out of luck. They’re calling it Think 25. People who look younger than seven years older than the legal drinking age will have to flourish their papers to get a beer. Just a final slap on the wrist from a departing government: in case you thought you were an adult or something.

Checkout staff get a lot of the frustration schemes like this cause taken out on them, which is unfair. If someone on a checkout in a supermarket sells alcohol to an underage drinker, then that person gets the full weight of the consequences - the fine and the criminal record as well as whatever disciplinary measures their employers take – even though they only profit extremely marginally from the transaction. It’s an interesting contrast in the application of responsibility.

The supermarkets have responded in this way because – well, because they can and the government is quite happy to let them dump the whole thing on frontline staff. That aside, licensing authorities have been quite active in sending underage narks into supermarkets to try to buy booze, so they are under a certain amount of pressure.

I can see this being extended under the think 25 scheme. This time, overage but youthful narks will be sent into supermarkets to see if they are required to show ID before they buy. And again, it’ll be the checkout staff who suffer if they are not – even though many of them will be under 25.

Hardly world shatteruing stuff, I know: merely intrusive, vaguely contemptible petty power abuse: the everyday stuff of life in the late New Labour era.

Comments

[septicisle]

For the most part, they do thankfully ignore it: I'm a year shy of 25 and probably look younger, and don't usually have any problems. It is however starting to get beyond a joke, and all it does is further encourages either parents or older siblings to buy it for them, who then go off and consume it on their own or in groups when they'd be better off drinking in a pub in the first place.

[Fellow Traveller]

So the government passes law making age discrimination illegal and asks retailers to discriminate on the basis of age.

It also seems significant as part of a general trend in government - getting business to enforce policy on the public voluntarily without passing any new legislation through Parliament. MPs don't get to vote on it, we don't get much public debate, ministers just meet the relevant company representatives behind closed doors and they enact it. All very tidy - a public-private partnership indeed.

[Tom]

A related matter caused a recent stir locally - a (presumably) respectable middle class chap sent his 14 year old daughter into Sainsbury's to pick up his Sunday Telegraph, only for her to return empty-handed because it was an age restricted product. The reason was (after some debate) established that it *might* have had a 15 or 18 film given away free (it didn't, in fact, that week's giveaway was PG, but the risk that it might be was considered sufficient for the whole rag to be rated 18+ in case the checkout operators fouled up).

The reaction was predictably fairly hostile, weirdly entering some kind of conspiracy world where NuLabour Gauleiters were preventing the sale of good honest British right wing newspapers as a way of shielding the young from the truth. I think I suggested going to a corner shop where someone might actually be persuaded to use their intelligence, but got drowned out.

[Richard J]

I've occasionally had the same trouble with the Saturday Grauniad, mind.

And I always feel vaguely embarrassed having to call the man over to the self-service checkout in Tescos when I want to buy Viz.