If You’re Carded at 65, That’s a Good Thing, Right?

September 9, 2007 at 3:23 am | In Consumer Issues, Consumer Rants, humor, rants, social comment, stupidity |

First let’s all take a moment of silence for the death of common sense.

A supermarket in Farmington, Maine refused to sell a bottle of wine to a 65 year old woman because she did not have her ID. The supermarket’s policy is to check the ID of anyone who looks under 45. If I were 65 and this happened to me I would probably kiss the cashier and be walking on air for the rest of the day. The woman, however, stated that no one would ever mistake her for under 45.

The woman, who normally carries her drivers license, had a broken leg and was driven by a friend. When she found she couldn’t buy the wine herself she asked her friend to buy it, but the friend was refused because she was attempting to “make a third party purchase” My eyes are rolling so far up in my head they hurt.

See this is why smart people cannot get good jobs anymore. How do I know they can’t? Because just about everyone I encounter in the business world, from the clerks to upper management, has the brains of a rock. Employers apparently prefer people who will just blindly obey, not think for themselves, and accept low pay.

I have to assume the main objective is to insure alcohol isn’t sold to minors, not inconveniencing those who are obviously of age, with stupidity. Since the woman was clearly not underage is it so unreasonable to expect employees to exercise a little common sense? I also have a little problem with a policy that refers to anyone who looks under 45. A policy should be a defined set of rules. Whether someone looks a certain age is an entirely subjective call. I might think any given individual looks 40, you might see them as 30.

Do they have a training class where the clerks are shown pictures of hundreds of people in order to determine what age they look? How does that work?