The other day in Tesco several Spanish people were buying some groceries, including a can of Pear Cider. When asked for ID the girl to the fore of the group produced her Spanish national ID card, which was refused as valid ID. In order to purchase alcohol at Tesco one must have a Garda National Age Card or a passport.
Seeing as how one doesn’t need a passport to travel within the EU, many French, Spanish, Polish and other European folk living or visiting here don’t have one, they have their national ID cards, and they don’t have a Garda National Age card.
In fact, a member of staff in tesco told me that they had heard of the Gardai telling people they were too old to get the Age Card.
So anyway, the Spanish ID card not being the right kind of ID, two other members of the group produced Passports, however the group were still denied their one can of Pear Cider because apparently it is the law that if someone tries to purchase alcohol with the wrong kind of ID, another person cannot then purchase that alcohol.
A member of tesco’s staff further explained that the individuals with passports would not be served alcohol if they came back to the store on their own. When asked within what timeframe, they replied ‘probably the rest of the day’.
Now, I understand where these well intentioned rules are coming from, but when put into practise it’s completely crazy.
It seems that the Tesco store policy is as a result of a deal they struck with the Gardai in order to be allowed to sell alcohol.
I don’t know much about alcohol laws, but it seems insane to me that this was a deal that was haggled out with the Gardai. Surely there must be some standard laws in place which would cover supermarket licences?
A member of Tesco staff admitted that this policy is a pain in the ass for Tesco as they constantly have to deal with both foreign nationals and students who are old enough to buy alcohol but don’t have the correct id with them.
It results in a certain amount of loss of sales as people who are refused alcohol often abandon the rest of their groceries too and leave to purchase elswhere.
I couldn’t find much information about store policies online, so I sent an email to customer.services@tesco.ie on the 04/08/08. No answer yet.
I summed up my email by saying:
- I would like to confirm that EU Country’s National ID Cards are
not valid ID’s for purchase of Alcohol at Tesco.
- If this is true, I would like to lodge an official complaint that
EU Country’s National ID Cards are not valid ID’s for purchase of
Alcohol at Tesco.
- I would like to enquire as to how this policy might be changed -
ie what can the consumer do to push for it to be ammended.
-
I would like to understand more about why Tesco has a different
policy to other Off Licences.
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