myoptika wrote:
It's a good idea really, because if you look over 25 then you're going to be over 21, unless you've had a really hard life. It just makes it easier for the shop to make sure they're not serving people who are underage.
It's a bloody stupid idea. Why should people have to carry around a passport just to make a perfectly legal purchase? The law is 18, not 25. Treating everyone like a criminal and idiot because we can't trust the kids is just going to make things worse. Some places check, some don't. It's always been that way, and will always be that way, cretinous policy or no.
I got ID-ed for the first time in years a while back, buying a bottle of cider from a checkout woman I'd chatted to several times, including chatting about the four years since I lived with a bunch of students, a year working in canterbury and how the papers are full of shit and london is not really full of people randomly stabbing each other, just a few hopeless gangster kids stabbing each other and occasionally an unfortunate third party. I was also buying salad, vegetables and several herbs. How many underage drinkers nip down to the shop to buy parsley, celery and booze, do you reckon? Fucking ridiculous, and no, I didn't have ID on me, because I was out to buy some dinner, not apply for a bank account. So, I put the bottle back, and stopped by another shop on the way home instead, exactly as any underaged drinker would have done, too. It's pointless and serves only to irritate and infantilise people.