Shopping in a budget store for wine with a grown up child

[Jenny2710]

She is 24 Iam much older, verging on 60, big shop after a holiday, can't buy alcohol as she does not have id , my shop, my card, what is going on.? Has anyone else had had this? So confused? Annoyed!

meji don't you understand that doing the "reason to believe" schtick on responsible parents shopping with their twelve year olds (or 6, 14 or 17 year olds) in the normal blameless way, is going to nark said parents right off?

It is absurd that the shop assistant is personally liable, it puts poorly paid people into a state of fear that they could lose their job and/or get clobbered with a huge fine. Hence some of the absurd scenarios described above.

In my opinion, the store should be liable ... the shop assistants are working for the shop, have supposedly been trained by the shop and should be properly managed. It lets the employers off the hook too easily.

It is absurd that the shop assistant is personally liable

Personally liable for what though? Fined for what? If I buy alcohol to give to my kids at home, I haven't broken any laws and neither have the shop assistant.

HOWEVER, it is an offence to knowingly supply alcohol to a minor, so if during the course of the transaction we have reason to believe it is a proxy sale (aka sale purely for intent to provide it to someone under 18)

Surely the key words here are 'knowingly' and 'reason to believe'.

So, someone buying a 24 pack of blue Wkd and telling the assistant, 'I don't drink this muck myself but my 12 old bloody loves it, they're for him' would be knowingly supplying. Fair enough to refuse the sale.

And 'reason to believe' surely requires some semblance of evidence? The minor selecting the alcohol or a group of teenagers pooling their money whilst the one with ID pays. The mere presence of another individual is not reason to believe that a proxy purchase is going on.

It's a bit of a scare tactic IMO. The sales assistants are too scared of disciplinary action to use their own judgement, alcohol sales makes supermarkets a lot of money so to have sanctions applied or lose that license would impact greatly, therefore these policies are put in place by the supermarkets. I'd say that it's probably how well the manager of that individual store understands the laws that dictates how strictly they enforce the policy. Of course sanctions may have already been applied to the license, which can happen if there are issues and the police and council can impose certain restrictions such as not selling alcohol between certain times, on certain days, or not selling alcohol to anyone accompanied by someone between say 16 and 18 without ID (they are just examples) it depends on the type of issues that have led to the sanctions.
The actual laws are also open to a certain amount of interpretation, they rely on judgement, which vary from person to person. The shop assistants judgement will differ from the managers and from a police officers to a licencing officer. Shop assistants are the bottom of the bunch though and the ones making the transaction, so they're the ones who carry the can.

When my daughter was under 18 she rather enjoyed mixing grenadine with lemonade. In the most ridiculous way, she was not allowed to buy it in Tesco. The stuff isn't even alcoholic, but was flagged up on the till as needing ID. Ludicrous.