I’ve wondered as much as well, when I returned home, after many years abroad with the military and my license had expired.
Apparently, I was no longer me, even when producing a military ID that was current and complemented the drivers license, merely to get a beer in a bar at age 30!
I can only assume that I cease to be me when my ID expires. No requirement exists in any state in the union that I am aware of that requires a current ADDRESS for having a drink in a bar!
If cashing a check or other transaction that prudence would require one to know the CURRENT address of a person, a CURRENT ID would be obvious.
But, for a drink or even to take out beer? I can only assume that my ID expiring caused me to be unborn. Perhaps I screwed up and paid taxes while I was unborn…
As I mentioned previously, in two instances, I returned from overseas deployment of 4 years and had a valid military ID and an expired drivers license.
My military ID, with photo built in, was unacceptable by both businesses (one a bar, one a beer distributor. I was over 30 at the time.) My drivers license was expired, hence my date of birth must have expired or something.
Both businesses NEVER got my business after I got my license renewed.
That’s fine, you’re within your rights to refuse to buy from whoever pisses you off or any other reason. I’m just pointing out that businesses and individual workers have no reason to bend the rules even slightly. When I was clerking, I think it was several thousand dollars in fines for the store, plus fifteen hundred or so and a thirty day unpaid suspension for the clerk as an individual. Repeated offenses can cost a store or even a whole chain their liquor license, which can mean the end of the business.
You’re right that your birthdate is still your birthdate no matter what the card says, but buying alcohol or other items with age limits is a privilege, not a right, and unless you can satisfy the shopkeeper that you are of age, he has a very strong incentive to refuse the sale.
Be as upset about it as you want, but if I ask for ID and you can’t or won’t produce it, I would refuse the sale.
That said, I have accepted valid military IDs, passports, out of state IDs, etc - and refused all of them if they were expired.
You’re following your policy, and that’s okay, but what I’m about to say isn’t about following your policy. It’s about common sense.
There’s no disputing that selling to an underage person can cause problems for the store. The standard of law in my state (at least) is as you say: satisfy the shopkeeper that you are of age. Being 30 and having an expired identification does this perfectly. It’s common sense. The incentive to the owner is to not lose sales over something so silly. Of course it’s his business, and he’s free to do as he pleases, so I’m okay with that. Some people don’t know their laws, and so if they lose sales unnecessarily, then I’m okay with that, too.
Common sense, if not used properly, can actually damage the shopkeeper. Selling to a minor because she has her older sister’s identification is not acceptable, either. The owner risks his license, and he’s not simply covered just because the chick had a valid ID.
Here in CA, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) has published a number of documents indicating the the ID presented must be “legally acceptable,” including the following criteria:
So while your appeal to common sense resonates with a large number of people who have come to my register with all manner of cards and papers outside the description above, the ABC here certainly encourages the idea that expired IDs are not valid for the purpose of buying alcohol, even if that’s not the actual law.
I understand your position about the damage a business can take from refusing sales to people over the age of 21, but it’s also worth noting that licenses to sell alcohol are (here, anyway) not inexpensive to acquire, and there’s always some kind of opposition from the “won’t somebody think of the children” and neo-prohibitionist sets. There’s tremendous political and societal pressure to keep alcohol out of underage hands, and the current local climate of tending to refuse expired IDs is a symptom of this.
I actually do agree that the current policies and laws about IDs are pretty dumb and reactionary, but the question posed in the OP was “why is this expired ID not acceptable?” and these are the answers.
Can someone explain what this person meant by ‘a privilege, not a right’? This doesn’t make sense to me…
(I have an additional question on the topic in general, but will wait to see if there’s a reply to this)
I had a Nevada Driver’s License but needed a California Driver’s License, so I went to Calif’s DMV. As soon as I handed her my Nevada DL, she punched a hole in it! (That seemed inappropriate. Shouldn’t she have told me “You understand I’ll need to invalidate your old license, right?”?) She gave me a temporary Calif DL but of course it lacked a photo.
I had great trouble cashing checks for a while, even though the punched-through Nev DL had a photo of me from only a year earlier.
Was that in Nevada? They also wanted proof of SS Number from me but I’d not seen my SS Card for decades. They suggested some alternative proofs of SSN none of which worked for me. I went to post office, got a blank 1040 form, filled it out randomly, Xeroxed the fake 1040, scuffed up the photocopy a bit, and went back to Nevada’s DMV. Driver’s license followed!
The answer is simple - a store owner is not obliged to sell to anyone, can deny service to anyone, provided the reason for denial is not due to their membership in a protected class.
So the store owner can refuse to serve if it’s “no shirt, no shoes, no service” or if they don;t like your attitude, or because you are wearing a shirt with an objectionable saying, or they heard you say something political they object to. (They can’t refuse to serve simply you because of your race, creed, colour, gender.) After all, the risk is much higher for the store than the customer if the ID is in fact incorrect.
So in that sense, being served is a privilege, not a right.
And the answer to the OP is simple - expired ID’s are often abandoned, liable to be taken, and the classic “using older sister’s ID” thing is one good reason to be wary of them. Whereas current valid ID’s are more likely to be guarded and held by the true owner.
If it’s something that requires a photo ID, then the photo has to look like the person, or there’s no point. A photo that’s too old won’t look like the person any more. How old is too old? Well, when it’s a form of ID that has an expiration date, the simplest is just to use the expiration date.
Is a driver’s license picture that expired yesterday really significantly less accurate than one that expires tomorrow? Well, no, not really… but you have to draw the line somewhere. That sort of thing happens all the time with the law: Plenty of 17-year-olds are more mature than plenty of 18-year-olds, but we still regard the latter as adults and not the former.
In Germany, until relatively recently, driving licences would not expire at all. Never. My dad got his in the 1970s and kept using it until he stopped driving maybe fifteen years or so ago. My grandfather, who died in the late 1990s and kept driving until the early 1990s, had got his driving licence as a soldier in the Wehrmacht during WWII and used that document throughout, complete with swastika stamp. In 2013, however, an EU directive entered into force which mandated all newly issued driving licences to have an expiry date on them, and which also mandated by statute an expiry date for old licences that had been issued without one.
This only worked because, by law, a driving licence is not a valid ID in Germany - there’s a separate ID card for that, and that card has always been subject to an expiry date. At least that’s the situation by law; more than once I’ve been in a situation where someone asked for my ID, all I had was the driving licence, they’d complain saying that this was not a valid ID, but they’d ultimately accept it when I pointed out that that was the best thing I had on me. I wonder if the new expiry dates on driving licences will blur the line between driving licences and ID cards further.
You are absolutely correct about the store being able to deny service to any one for any reason or no reason at all as long as it’s not because of race, gender etc. However, this
and this
really only make sense if we are talking about ID for an age-restricted activity and someone who is close to the threshold age. It makes some sense to refuse to accept my expired ID that says I’m 23 when I want to buy beer ( I look enough like my sisters that we could all have used each other’s photo ID when we were young). It makes a lot less sense when I’m 60 or the ID is being requested for some other reason, like to give me a visitor pass at a hospital. Especially since I can take that expired license to DMV and that’s all the proof I will need to get a new one within 2 years of the expiration date.* As far as looking like the photo goes - at one point, I had the same photo on my license for around 20 years ( I only got a new photo because I got an enhanced license - otherwise, I would still have my photo from 1999 or so).
* And after 2 years, I don’t just have to provide new proof of my name, residence and/or date of birth - I must start the whole process again as if I had never had a license.
I apologize to relatives and friends of the deceased. I can see that addressing their late friend may have been unseemly, but I didn’t stop to question. Hopefully ten years has been enough time for them to cycle through the stages of grief.
[Moderating]
Nah, you’re fine. You had no way of knowing, and on a board this old, it’s unfortunately inevitable that some of our members would have passed on. That doesn’t mean that discussion has to stop.
I note there is no response to this question yet so…
Unless I misunderstand your question, the statement that something “is a privilege not a right” refers to that specific something being a thing that you can do only with permission. This would be as opposed to it being a “right” meaning that your permission is ingrained into something i.e. the Constitution of the United States, etc.
For further example, I am allowed to drive because I met the requirements of the state issuing my driver’s license. I do not have any innate right to drive without having done so.
