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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Minimizing teen drinking is all very well, but I despise the permission-seeking society we've ended up with with you have to show ID in all kinds of places and beg for permission to exist.

Last winter my wife was ill with a cold. I stuck my credit card in my pocket and went to the drugstore to buy a box of Theraflu, an over-the counter decongestant. They wouldn't sell it to me without ID and when I protested this they grabbed the box and told me to get out of the store or they would call over their armed security guy. This was a corporate change, I had bought the same product many times before without ever being asked for ID.

People are forced to ask permission far more today than a few decades ago, and everyone is treated like a suspect if they object. I don't know who's more contemptible, the petty authoritarians or the people meekly giving up their privacy and dignity to get permission to engage in the most ordinary activities.

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If it was the “real” Theraflu, which contains pseudoephedrine, then it happened because all sales of products that contain pseudoephedrine are tracked. It’s to prevent it from being used in bulk as a raw material to make meth.

Most stores sell non-pseudoephedrine versions of the same medications that usually have phenylephrine which does not require showing and tracking your ID. But anyone whose taken it know that phenylephrine is a poor substitute and barely acts as a decongestant.

This is 1000% what was going on if they asked for ID for theraflu.

Sounds like they could’ve done a better job explaining what was going on. But I imagine that as a pharmacist, “guy who’s mad he can’t buy pseudo anonymously” isn’t someone you have a lot of patience with.

Which is honestly sad. Would we ideally not show equal respect for those who don't care to have their ID registered for every little thing? Isn't that a reasonable thing to want anymore?

If they're loud, obnoxious or stubborn about it (if they don't accept a reasonable explanation), that's obviously something else. I'm not talking about people being a dick. Just the general principle of taking that moment to explain the why rather than assuming anyone who doesn't immediately comply with a "hand over your ID for registration" order must have security called upon them as in the example above.

Full disclosure: I'm also this kind of person. Needed to authenticate myself to get a phone number (a regular phone number, both pre and post paid at different times so that's not the difference) at a local office. The person behind the register takes my ID, I figured she'd check and we'd be good, but then she puts both sides under some reader. I happen to know it's illegal to copy the national identifier code (BSN in Dutch) but I don't want to be obnoxious right? Not as if she's a lawyer, she's just doing what she's told to. So I just ask (politely, I thought, not stopping her or anything) which field(s) the machine copies. Well now did I want to let her do her job or should I find myself another carrier maybe? was the retort.

Hotels, similar thing. Photocopying an ID in that situation is illegal for the same reason. Employees get hostile faster than a tesla gets to 60, and I'm left feeling of a different generation before I'm even 30 years old. Anonymity is not an option, heck even complying with GDPR is not something one can expect, but refusing to even inform me what they're doing? That's off limits now?

They made no explanation to tell me what was going on, and as I pointed out I had purchased the same product many times before (as in buying a single once or twice a year over the last decade, not every day).

If they want to control the sale of it then they can put it behind the counter or put a giant advisory sign nex tto it on the shelf. But they don't do that because it will hurt profits. I don't care about their problems with meth heads.

This is not just about the situation of buying one kind of cold medicine. I'm in my 50s, why should I need to present ID if I wish to buy a beer or attend a show? Sure, the answer is 'we have to minimize our liability' but the answer to that is not to violate everyone else's privacy and autonomy.

I'm an easygoing responsible person who doesn't do stupid shit. I'm just running out of patience with public and commercial entities handing me the metaphorical bill for every imaginable security issue. The USA has turned into a nation of paranoids where people are interrogated over things like nail clippers.

Well I am not familiar with the law but if it doesn’t specifically mandate some sort of warning or sign then it’s not surprising pharmacies want to cut costs as much as possible. You can vote with your time and wallet and go to a more upscale pharmacy with presumably better service.

I know people that leave the house without their phone and ID on them, but I’m not one of them. Also, the annoyance of having to produce my ID is so trivial in comparison to the meth crisis. If this helps, I’m ok with it.

But it doesn't help, it's just security theater like the TSA. Meth makers are still making plenty of meth. It's like the war on drugs, a complete failure. It's just an inconvenience for legit people using theraflu/sudafed and in no way slows down meth production in any meaningful way.

This is a classic example of punishing ordinary people for the actions of a few. The alternative decongestants are a placebo at best, they do absolutely sod all for me.

I don't care. I was buying one box of it, not their entire stock. If it doesn't require a prescription then the vendor doesn't require my identity.

But federal regulation says it does.

Smurfing is the practice of sending several people out to buy pseudoephedrine just a box or two at a time at a bunch of different stores. These federal id tracking requirements are an attempt to curb that.

As others have said, how much does that really curtail the meth making in this country? I'd be surprised if it's over .1%. So everyone else has to jump through hoops so the agencies can claim a hollow victory. This type of thinking is rampant in the US and it gets so tiring.

Hard to say, but it forced Walt to use other methods like using phenylamine as a pre-cursor, which was a lot harder to come by. To get that you will need to have contact with some big corp and rob a train or something so barrier of entry is much higher.

Has anyone ever looked into the real effect laws like these this have? It's never really bothered me having to produce ID, but after thinking about it, I am curious as to how much these laws really help.

>But federal regulation says it does.

Yes. Regulation can be BS too.

Some stores seem to ask for IDs for all cold medicine, not just the kind with pseudoephedrine. CVS does this all the time for me.

Phenylephrine is highly effective at raising blood pressure, though!

The worst I've encountered of this type of head-in-the-sand logic was in NZ. They have a law that if a person buys alcohol with companions, the clerk will check the IDs of all of them, not just the buyer's. Presumably this is to stop underage kids having an older friend buy them booze. In reality obviously, teens without IDs just wait outside and literally 100% of the times this law is applied is when an over-age-but-without-ID is accompanying someone shopping for some dinner wine. Like me and my ex gf...

I had something similar at a liquor store in Utah.

My mom (well over 21) tried to buy liquor, but was refused because a lack of ID. She sent me (also well over 21) to buy instead. At the register, I made a passive aggressive comment about how my mom was refused 30 mins ago. So they refused ME because they wanted to "ID all people at my party" - or something like that.

This is standard practice in the UK too - if you're buying alcohol as a group, they'll ask for everyone's ID if any of you look too young.

But this isn't specifically written into the law, i.e. the law doesn't say "you must check the ID of everyone in the group." Rather, it's that businesses receive ENORMOUS fines if they're caught selling alcohol to underage people - so most of them have very strict internal policies to minimise the chances of a false negative.

Does that mean you can't bring your kid on a trip to the supermarket?

>Does that mean you can't bring your kid on a trip to the supermarket?

I would support a law that prohibits kids in a grocery store

You clearly have never cared for a child.

On the contrary, I have 4 daughters and I took them to the grocery store earlier today.

At the liquor store where I live you can't bring your kids inside with you to buy alcohol.

I couldn't agree more and I see that this is more prevalent in the US than most other countries.

I've lived abroad for sometime now and last time I went home to California to visit, I went to a restaurant to have a beer and dinner with my dad.

I've been gone for so long, I no longer have a drivers license or ID except for my passport, which I don't carry around with me.

I tried to order a beer and they refused. I was very upset as I'm 35 and obviously not a kid. I was just trying to have a beer and catch up with my dad.

Just a huge lack of sensibility in the US these days. They would never do this in 90% of the world. Unless of course you're obviously young.

Just to defend the waitstaff at this restaurant-- the law could be that if the waiter didn't verify the ID, the waiter would be personally liable, fines easily equal to 1-3 months income. Also, cops do 'sting' operations where they try to persuade waiters to let them buy drinks without showing ID.

This doesn't change your basic premise (the law is nuts), rather it extends it (the law is even more nuts than you expected).

The situation isn't common--I don't know the last time I've been asked for ID to purchase alcohol as someone who is very obviously not underage--but every now and then you'll run across a place that IDs everyone. Presumably, they've been busted for selling to underage and management has just taken judgement out of the hands of waitstaff/bartenders.

the law could be that if the waiter didn't verify the ID

Not to go all lawyer on you, but wouldn't be a good idea to see what the law actually says instead of making up reasons that might or might not exist? In CA the law is not really that onerous and just says it's a misdemeanor to sell to someone under 21. The only severe penalty is serving alcohol to someone who is a minor and already intoxicated (and thus that much more likely to do something stupid). But it's widely understand socially that any drunk person can be refused further alcohol at the discretion of the seller. But many commercial entities have just decided the way to cover themselves is just demand ID from everyone.

https://www.abc.ca.gov/education/licensee-education/laws-and...

I would suggest that the problem here is corporatism rather than authoritarianism. The store will always have made a judgement call over whether you were responsible enough to be sold certain medications. What seems to have changed is the removal of that authority from the local shop workers, which has been centralised into a bureaucratic process. Scenarios like this are one reason why I believe we should proactively bias our economy against large organisations and in favour of smaller ones.

Just in case you're unaware of the context of these rules:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoephedrine#Manufacture_of...

I'd perhaps prefer a world in which many drugs were legally sold, which might make this specific issue disappear but even then I'm happy that cigarettes and alcohol, and some other potentially dangerous items are age restricted.

From quickly looking at a few random Theraflu products - they don't seem to contain pseudo. Though asking a random store worker to know that would not be ideal, but a pharmacist should have definitely sold them this medicine without ID.

They (like many other brands) phased it out to avoid this situation, whether it was the case at the time of this anecdote is unclear.

Legal requirement of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005.

https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/meth/#sales

I do find it funny that many US-Americans online joke about the UK having TV licence by asking if we "have a loicence" for various unrelated things, while the US seems obsessed with providing driving licences for all sorts of every-day activities.

Having lived in the US and the UK (as well as several other countries within Europe) for several years, I can say that in my experience the "license/permission to do X" is generally far more prominent in the UK/most European countries than it is in the US.

Not only US-Americans joke about that.

“I need a license for my pet fish, Eric.”

UK resident here, and I'm pretty sure I've only ever once been asked for ID for alcohol -- and that was at a private work event where everyone was definitely over 18 (and I was 38 and not drinking).

I've never been asked for ID for either OTC or prescription medicine, and while I obviously need to present a passport to travel internationally, the airline doesn't need to see it. And all my recent travel has been domestic, and not needed ID.

(Since I turned 18, the government scheme for when to ask for ID for alcohol has ratcheted up from nothing to "Think 21" and on to "Think 25" so a younger me would probably have needed to show ID at least a bit. But I don't think that's entirely unreasonable)

In the UK, you have to show your ID if you want to buy scissors.

Nonsense! I bought kitchen scissors from a hardware store in the UK a couple of weeks ago (but I'm 65, with a white beard; perhaps they'd have tried to card me if I might conceivably have been under 18).

No, for two reasons. One, while some retailers might decide that "scissors" are really knives and so they'd best act as though you're buying a knife that is not the law. So, this is not something you "have to" do, it's a store policy, like if they won't sell you more than six rolls of toilet paper at a time.

Two, if you're old (which unfortunately I am) then your apparent age is enough anyway. I do not ordinarily carry ID. Nobody stops me buying alcohol, entering nightclubs, watching movies, or doing other age-restricted activities, because "This person is obviously like, fifty?" is enough.

There are places with a policy of asking everyone for ID -- I know because they're the only places where I've been asked for ID.

Of course, for both the knife and the alcohol regulations, the law is around age. ID is merely the mechanism that everyone uses to validate age, as it's settled practice that doing so will prove the ID card holder's age sufficiently for the purpose of the legislation.

It's gotten ridiculous. The drinking age here is 19. Anywhere that sells alcohol is required to ID anyone that appears to be 30 or under. By the time you're 30 you haven't been 19 for 11 years.

I've been refused for having expired ID, despite the picture very obviously being me, and my age very obviously being well over the legal age.

My wife's been refused because apparently her federally issued citizenship card, with a photo that showed she was well over age wasn't apparently good enough.

I actually remember one time when i was fairly young, early 20's, I'd let my license expire because I wasn't driving and couldn't be bothered to renew it at the time. I got refused at the liquor store and there was an old guy behind me. He just started ranting at the cashier about how I'm obviously legal age and how you don't need a license to drink and all this stuff. The cashier actually relented and sold it to me after, but that old guy's rant always stuck with me since.

And, it's made me notice how more and more, it's not even about how old you are, it doesn't seem to be about protecting minors, it just seems to be a way of training people to provide ID any time regardless of the reason.

Why on earth does it matter if your ID is expired?? Do you stop being the person on the ID once the expiry date is reached?

I’ve pointed out that my place and date of birth haven’t changed since the ID expired. The sarcasm is never appreciated, but it feels good.

This enables newer cards to have updated security features. If there were no expirations, then you'd just make fake ids targeting older versions.

A store, at least a sane one, would never refuse from making a sale and wouldn't make it hard to make such a sale.

What the store is doing is not preventing teens from buying Alcohol or Tobacco, it's simply covering its ass. There is a certain liability with certain transactions. In that case, the store covers. If it can't cover, it doesn't make the transaction as the liability is too high for whatever profit there is.

I'd encountered a similar incident some years ago. I was fine with showing an ID, but when the clerk then tried to take it from my hand, I held it firmly.

I left my purchase at the counter and went elsewhere to buy herbal teas.

Subsequent research suggests that few cold remedies are effective at all (though decongestants can improve breathing). Teas with slippery elm and eucalyptus seem at least somewhat effective, don't require IDs, and are not meth precursors.

On why / how older generations may be primed to object: I remember reading a science fiction story in the late 1970s / early 1980s, a short in a compilation (likey a Hugo or similar award collection), in which a data system with universal identification system, with one of the designers of the system being given the opportunity to opt out.

He does.

I think of that story often.

There’s no world without identity, reputation, and trust. It’s just that they’re either systematized and scalable, or informal. Systematized has a lot of things going for it over informal; for example, the pharmacist isn’t checking “do I know his family and is their reputation in the community a good one?” or “does he have the skin color, facial features, and clothing of an upstanding citizen?” It is very specifically, how much pseudoephedrine have you already purchased? I call that progress.

I don't consider myself a conspiracy theory type of guy but I can see why people are quoting Revelation 13:16 more and more as e-payments and e-id becomes harder to avoid.

That seems difficult to test. For convenience here is the text:

Revelation 13:16-18 New International Version

16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.

18 This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.

I'm not religious but I think this is brilliant. Some 2000 years ago they'd already realized how dangerous it is if a tyrannical government has a way of IDing everyone and using that ID to arbitrarily grant or deny people rights and services on a whim. It's like anti-totalitarianism built right into the religion.

I don't think it was an "if", there is speculation that the mark is reference to Nero [0]. If true this means it wasn't a guess about the future but a commentary on current day events.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_beast#Nero

The algorithm of the beast is Sha 256

The chmod of the beast is 666. Also daemons are everywhere.

You might not. Other people do.

sympathizing with someone's point of view != agreeing

The most ridiculous example of this is that I was forced to show ID to buy alcohol-free beer… To be fair the cashier also thought it was ridiculous but she couldn’t proceed without scanning some sort of ID in the system.

I was in a hotel today, where I was staying with my family, in a small 20sqm room.

When we went to the restaurant to have breakfast, they adamantly refused to remove the clear plastic partition dividing the table in two.

We couldn’t move it to the side, we couldn’t move it anywhere else. It had to physically separate my wife and I. To what purpose, I have no clue.

Oh, we’re both vaccinated. But it is corporate policy, so nothing we (or the staff) can do, even though anyone with a brain could see that it was pointless.

I really do hate those Perspex dividers, they’re the epitome of corporate “we have to look like we’re doing something even if it’s about as useful as a water pistol against a battleship”.

I call this “Pandemic theater”

At this point you should have just sat on the same side of the table as your wife and left the other side empty.

Was told that I was required to show government issued ID to buy a iPhone at Target. With cash! Insanity.

When you buy any phone with cash it’s a legal requirement

> I despise the permission-seeking society we've ended up with with you have to show ID in all kinds of places and beg for permission to exist.

If you think it's bad now, wait until they roll out vaccine passports.

I completely agree with you.

Some advice you never asked for: in that situation, protesting often makes things worse. Learning a little bit of negotiation and sales is an invaluable investment in life.

A simple you seem concerned about selling this to the wrong people / I'm about to make your day a little bit more difficult / you probably think I'm being unreasonable / is it absolutely impossible for me to come home with the medication my wife expects me to? / I don't want you to do something you're uncomfortable with / how can I explain this to my wife? can go a long way.

You seem to be under the impression I made a scene. In reality they refused to answer any questions and were extremely rude for no apparent reason. Perhaps they had a bad experience earlier that day, but that's not my fault.

It was your mention of the word "protest" which is usually used to mean an adversarially stated objection, rather than an attempt at working out a common problem together.

> the word "protest" which is usually used to mean an adversarially stated objection

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/protest :

> the act of objecting or a gesture of disapproval

> a complaint, objection, or display of unwillingness usually to an idea or a course of action

I don’t think you are generally in a state of mind to symphatize with someone that just refused to sell you a perfectly legal product regardless of your age.

Well, then my advice would be to practise entering that state of mind when a person deserves it the least (because then you are likely to benefit from it the most.)

Nonsense, getting angry and salty is always the way to go.

On a more serious note, I wonder just how people end up with unpleasantness being the standard go-to behaviour when people behind the counter aren't just giving them what they want.

Surely at some point in their lives they must have noticed that being polite and pleasant is far more likely to get you what you want than acting like a dick?

Usually the guy behind the counter has no say on company policy, and going against it is very much not in their interest. They'll be even less inclined to breaking policy over someone that acts like an asshole

Yeah, I won't say it's always the case but if you're asking some low-paid worker to bend a rule for you the way to guarantee they won't is to be rude, no matter how ridiculously inflexible they seem to be being.

Patience and forbearance are great virtues, but if those are your only virtues you'll end being treated as a doormat.

In the UK, once someone's asked you for ID for an age-restricted item, they're not allowed (by law) to back down. You show ID, or you leave without the item.

In general, I think it's unfair to ask a probably-underpaid cashier to break policy in this way -- they almost certainly have no control over the policy, and quite possibly face severe consequences if they acquiesce.

I was not aware that was the law in the U.K. I would probably have found out by being nice. Less likely to find out by being abrasive.

----

The probably-underpaid people who break policy make the world go around. We'd get nothing real done if people just followed policy all day long.

It might sound like I'm joking, but I don't. I have huge amounts of respect for those people, and obviously if they help me out I will do what I can to help them out. (Even if it's just paying it forward and breaking policy when necessary myself.)

I'm not anti-policy. I love good policy, and I rarely have reason to break it. The policy that often needs breaking is the bad policy.

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