Walmart Won’t Sell Beer to Dad With Teen In Tow

Via The Des Moines Register,
your latest tale of our nanny culture gone nuts. This story
comes courtesy of an Ames, Iowa, Walmart, where a man named Jim
Davis was barred from buying a bottle of Smirnoff and two six-packs
of Budweiser. The reason? Because he had his 15-year-old daughter
with him. 

Nevermind that Davis himself is far above the legal drinking
age. A Walmart cashier refused to sell alcohol to the 57-year-old
after carding his teen daughter, who had no ID. In an email, a
customer service rep told him it was part of new efforts the chain
was testing to discourage underage drinking.

“In order to ensure that alcoholic beverages and tobacco are not
sold to minors, Walmart is testing point-of-sale age checks in some
locations across the country,” the customer service statement read.
“By testing this, we hope to discover the best methods for ensuring
that products are not sold illegally to minors. In addition, to
comply with federal laws, stores may ask for the ID from
individuals within a group other than the person making the
purchase.”

Not quite sure what the spokesperson means by “testing
point-of-sale age checks in some locations.” Isn’t checking ID for
alcohol sales is already a practice everywhere? Group ID checking
might make sense when you have a horde of young people. (As a bunch
of 19-year-old college kids, we knew better than to go into the
grocery store with the 21-year-old friend buying the beer.) But
when you have a parent buying alcohol with a teen in tow?
Absurd. 

The Register writer, Lee Rood, said he contacted
Walmart for a response but two spokespeople promised to answer his
questions “then did not respond for two weeks or return subsequent
messages.” After Rood’s article was published Monday, he was able

to get in touch with Brian Nick, Walmart’s director of national
media. “What happened is not consistent with the intent of our
policy,” Nick said.  

“The last thing you want to do is create an atmosphere where
people feel they can’t be in the store purchasing things with their
children.”

According to Nick, Walmart’s official policy for alcohol is
merely to check the ID of whomever’s doing the purchasing if they
appear under 40. He told Rood the policy would be clarified in Ames
and Des Moines, “where readers reported similar experiences.”
Apparently this isn’t just an isolated incident of employee
idiocy.

In the recent Reason-Rupe millennial poll, a majority (54
percent) said
policies aimed at preventing underage drinking are ineffective,
and 22 percent said these policies “create more problems than they
solve.”