Pseudoephedrine (PSE) laws, specifically AR

Factual Questions
41

I’ve got to side with your employer on this one. I think it’s perfectly sensible for a large retailer to expect its employees to make sales according to company policy, and not to refuse sales based on personal judgments of whether the customer is “suspicious” in some way. There are a number of reasons to do this:

  1. Money. Obviously, your employer shouldn’t be able to break the law, but if a given sale is legal, it’s reasonable for them to want to make the sale, unless there is some specific reason not to.

  2. Customer relations. I can imagine some customers being pretty upset at being denied a sale, not because of the law or even a specific company rule (e.g., can’t buy more than X boxes at a time, or must have ID) but just because the person behind the counter thinks you’re up to no good.

  3. Consistency. If the customers you turned away came back when a different person was on duty, or went to a different location, there’s a good chance they’d be served, because it just depends on whether the person on duty finds them suspicious, rather than any specific rules. That will be confusing and frustrating for customers, and also opens the door to the next concern…

  4. Discrimination. I’ll assume that you personally have the best of intentions here. But if you’re a large employer with many front-line employees, how confident are you going to be that they will all make good decisions about who is “suspicious”? How long until someone discovers an employee with a pattern of finding black people suspicious? Or people who “talk funny” or “look weird”?

Of course, all this changes if there’s a law specifically prohibiting the sales in question (though from your description, I doubt it). And it might make sense for a store to have some specific policies to combat drug abuse, like not selling too much to one person, or requiring people to show ID. But I can certainly understand why a store (particularly a large retailer, where you don’t know all your employees that well) would not want people refusing sales based solely on personal suspicions.

42

All fair enough. If the store documents its policies in writing, then I suspect the OP couldn’t face criminal or civil liability for following the policies. That’s obviously not the case with alcohol sales, and perhaps that’s what the OP is concerned about… personal liability.

But maybe he’s just frustrated at how well the meth-heads are able to circumvent the poorly conceived law. If that’s the case, his beef is with the Congress, not his store’s management.