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06/06/2003: a RL mini-rant
I have short mini-rant about someone's behavior in the supermarket today: I was standing in line in the supermarket across the street, and there were some kids too, a group of four boys, all maybe 13 or 14 or so, and they had been standing in front of the shelves with the cheap booze, and had been talking, but I didn't pay much attention. Anyway, a man in the line behind me called over to those boys, who by then were in the next line, and had decided not even to try to buy the alcohol, and that guy behind me asked them what they had wanted (they replied with "Korn", a rye or wheat schnapps with usually around 40% alcohol), and said that he'd buy it for them if they gave him the money. Strangely they actually declined the offer.
I mean, I don't feel strongly about youths buying alcohol, if kids want to get hard liquor they will, it's just like with other drugs (I think actual prevention needs more than trying to control access, which in the end will be futile anyway), but really, to offer boys to buy hard liquor, without being asked to, when they obviously weren't even 16 yet (that is the legal age to buy beer and wine here, as well as pre-mixed drinks below a certain percentage of alcohol, like premixed rum-cola and the like), let alone 18 (the legal age for hard liquors) -- I was just baffled. I don't know why those kids had decided against trying to buy it themselves (it's not like actual ID checks for teenagers buying alcohol are all that common, at least they didn't used to be), but after all there's the possibility that they had actually talked in front of the shelves before and decided against buying, because they might not have been sure that they really wanted to get smashed together, or maybe it even was the first time they wanted to try hard liquor and then changed their mind, who knows -- but it just struck me as wrong and appalling that this guy acted like a pusher.
