Yeah, store policy is to check everyone who looks under thirty. If you’re buying craftbrew, you tend to look older than if you’re buying Bud Light.
I made a really really dodgy fake ID when I was fifteen, used a dot matrix printer to print out a “college ID”, and didn’t have lamination available so covered it in book covering. It surprisingly worked twice to get me into pubs.
Whose employer? According to Jack Batty, six kids went into the store. The limo driver apparently stayed in the car and was not among them inside. One of the kids attempted to purchase the alcohol.
Ahhh…
The way I read that the first time through, I thought it was the limo driver who tried to purchase the alcohol.
When I was in middle-high school, I looked older than my age. I was regularly hit on by college students who would become very flustered when I told them I was only 13 (or 14 or whatever). The only times I ever tried to buy cigarettes were when my sister had tried and had been rejected. I didn’t start smoking until I was almost 19 but my sister started when she was 13. We looked nothing alike so no one ever assumed I was buying for the skinny blond chick who just left the store. I started buying them for her when I was 14.
She was 17. :rolleyes:
I have had my ID denied once. I was about 3 months from turning 19 and I had only been smoking for about 4 months so the stores near my house didn’t know me all that well yet. My sister had been buying them for me because I didn’t have an picture ID. I was over 18 so it didn’t really matter.
Anyway,
The cashier refused my ID. His reason was that it wasn’t a real ID because it was PAPER. Well, it said right on it that it was a temporary ID, the kind they give you after you pass your driving test so that you can drive without trouble until the plastic one comes in. He also said that it had to be a fake because no one waits until they’re almost 19 to get a license. The fact that we lived in a town with awesome public transportation didn’t mean anything to him.
I HAD BOUGHT A CAR, AND OBTAINED A CAR LOAN WITH THAT PAPER ID yet he wouldn’t sell me a pack of cigarettes because it wasn’t plastic. He then threatened to confiscate my license so I pulled out my cell phone (in 1998 not many people my age had cell phones yet, I was the first person I knew of to have one - it was a crappy little Motorola Startac - piece of shit but sweet for the year) and started to call the cops. He finally gave it back when he realized that I wasn’t bluffing. He could have made a lot of money off me over the years between my really bad sweet tooth, gas, cigs and my then addiction to lottery tickets. Instead I never went back and got my sister and roommate (both smokers with gambling problems) to never go there either.
Our store policy was that we weren’t required to accept anything other than a Nevada driver’s license/ID card or military ID card. If someone showed up from some other state, and we had no frigging idea what that state’s DL/ID card looked like, we weren’t required to accept it. For all we knew, someone had made up a fake ID, and we’d have no way to tell if it was forged or not. Store policy was also that if a clerk sold booze to a minor, the clerk was responsible for the fine, and was fired. A few of the clerks did sell to minors, out of pity or greed.
One of the more aggravating aspects of that job was that the owner expected all the clerks to remember if someone was a legal adult or not, after one carding. HE could do it, and he thought that everyone else should be able to do it, too…even if the customer only stopped in once every couple of weeks.
That guy had three c stores, and he must have been the only c store in the country that didn’t sell rolling paper. He was fine with selling booze and cigarettes, and fine with having an assortment of slots in the store. But he wouldn’t sell a legal product that was usually used to smoke pot.
I’ve never, that I recall be outright refused, but a couple of times whilst in licenced establishments while in the US I’ve been told that my Irish passport was not acceptable as proof of my age.
I remember once reading about how an airline stewardess refused to sell Kristen Bell a drink during a flight. She even recognized who Bell was. Bell finally had to produce her ID to show that while she played a high school student on TV she was actually 26 in real life.
Human nature being what it is, I seemed to get a lot less inspection of the fake ID I had in college when I gave it to the clerk before they asked for it than if I waited.
I also knew a guy who had a pretty bad one, but he usually got sold to by complaining to the clerk about having a little brother who needed him to buy for him. I guess the clerk usually thought that if he was buying for someone else, he must be old enough. He still had some decide the ID wasn’t right, but he never had one refuse him for buying for someone underage.
They changed the law here in Indiana so that cashiers have to card EVERYONE, regardless of how old they look. It’s pretty ridiculous and a lot of people have gotten very angry over it. I do not envy the people checking ID’s.
I don’t particularly enjoy going to Oklahoma for training, but when I do, that turns out to be the case in supermarkets where I go to pick up a twelve-pack of 3.2 (everybody being carded, regardless of apparent age). Funny thing is, the couple of times I’ve gone to a package store for something a little more robust, looking my age (53 at the time of my last visit) is all the ID I’m required to produce.
It’s never bothered me, but I confess that I’m glad my California DL isn’t considered invalid for them to accept.
I graduated high school in New Orleans when the drinking age was still 18. Went to Pat O’Brien’s one night with my sister and her (now ex-)husband when I was three months short, ordered a margarita, got carded, and still got my drink. Still had my boot camp crew cut so that probably helped.
That’s a damn good idea.
Any chance it was a sting operation? He stood around because you never specifically told him to leave?
Sorry about that; cochrane nailed it.
Also, I don’t doubt the ‘kid’ trying to buy the alcohol was 21, but he still wasn’t going to get beer and wine coolers for the kiddies.
When I was in high school there was this little market about a block from my house. The guy behind the counter would ask “You 21, right boss?” and I would answer “Yeah, I’m 21”. He never carded me or anyone else. I’ve always suspected that place was really just a front for a drug business.
That’s actually a pretty stupid policy, since if a clerk sells to a minor, it would put his liquor license at risk.
In my high school convenience store job we had a tyrant of a manager who demanded that we card for EVERY purchase of alcohol or cigarettes. I mean, EVERY SINGLE ONE. So why didn’t we just type in “1903” on the register for the DOB of someone who was obviously old enough for a beer or cigarette? Because there were cameras above the register and we got chewed out later if there were booze or smokes visible and we didn’t card. Imagine my embarrassment when I had to tell some biker in a leather jacket with tattoos all over both arms that I needed to see his ID for a pack of Camels.
I know I’ve told this story as well, but whatever…
In southern Ontario, I went out to dinner with 3 friends. We were all 20 or so at the time, with the drinking age being 19 there. The server cards us, so we all pull out our ID:
- Me: old version of Quebec Licence, still valid for another year or two
*Boyfriend : new version of Quebec License, recently obtained (and they’ve changed it againnow)
*Friend 1: New York State driver’s License
*Friend 2: Ontario driver’s license
Waitress: 
at all the different cards.
She brought them all over to her manager (or was it a waiter and the manager a guy? I don’t remember) and they spend a few minutes looking over them, and actually flipping through a binder with what I assume were samples of valid licenses. They eventually decide they were legit and allowed us to order beer, but it was rather funny.
Similarly, buying wine at an LCBO around the same time, the employee in training took my DL, got confused, asked if I had another photo ID on me. I gave him my health card which has photo and DOB to confirm, and he told me health cards weren’t valid (which is true for Ontarian health cards), then asked my boyfriend for his ID…he produced the same two types of cards, with the other version of the DL. Once again, a manager had to be called over to verify it was all legit before we could purchase our wine.
One of my best friends is more than a year older than I am, five feet tall, and half-Pakistani. I met her because she was dating (and is now married to) another one of my best friends. When she first moved up here, during our fourth year of college and her fifth, she had the worst time getting served alcohol. She was 22 but looked much younger, and being from Oklahoma, her license looked like something she’d whipped up on a home printer. (It was just a laminated cheap-looking piece of paper.)
Hell, just a few years ago we were headed to a movie theater inside a mall, which had a curfew for anyone under the age of 17 without parental supervision, and she (25-27 at the time) got carded by one of the security guards (I, six foot tall white chick, didn’t).
What’s hilarious is that everybody I knew who bought rolling papers used them for cigarettes (hand-rolled or machine-filled), including me. The pot smokers all used pipes and such.
One of the things I learned fast when I worked in Ontario’s Beer Stores was that IDs come in all kinds of flavours. Heck, I remember Ontario Age of Majority cards, Ontario’s new driver’s licenses, Ontario’s old but unexpired driver’s licenses, Ontario’s old laminated driver’s licenses that had expired but (as per Ontario government regulations) still acceptable as ID, and one or two others Ontario handed out. Given that Ontario had a number of valid IDs in circulation at one time, I’m not surprised if the LCBO clerk was flummoxed upon seeing two different kinds of Quebec driver’s licenses.
But our policy was to accept anything as long as it had been issued by a legitimate government and bore a photo and date of birth. So, in my time at the Beer Store, I saw driver’s licenses from all Canadian provinces and most states of the US, Canadian citizenship cards, and plenty of foreign passports, military IDs, and so on. Mind, I was also shown library cards, high school student IDs, credit cards, citizenship cards where the photo was of a five-year-old (“I don’t care if it is what you looked like fourteen years ago, it doesn’t look like you now”), business cards (“You’re kidding, right?”) and similarly unacceptable things.
It was an experience!