Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

My mom has a funny story about how my grandfather surprisingly didn't get arrested.

Back in West Germany, they had lived across from a bar, and every night my grandfather would send my mom and her older sister across the street to get some beer for him.

Then they moved to Ohio and rented an apartment down the block from the bar. And my grandfather sent two little girls who didn't speak any English to the bar for some beer.

Well, they came back with cops, who then had to fetch a neighbor who spoke more English than my grandparents to translate and explain the whole situation. The cops then left with a, "don't do that again" and that was the end of it.

The mind boggles at how quickly Opa would have been behind bars in 2023.

In Southern California in the late 80s / early 90s I had a few friends that were regularly sent to the corner store for cigarettes. They had to bring a note, but otherwise the store seemed to think this was normal.

I was in a small village pub in England one Boxing Day.

A man at the table next to ours handed a £10 note to his sons, who were about 8-10 years old. They went to the bar and asked for two Fantas or something like that. The bartender said "I can't serve you, you need to be 16".

Silence fell. It was a small room, and we'd all heard the boys ask.

The old man at the end of the bar said, "You'll serve the boys, John, or else you won't be seeing me in here again."

The boys got their Fantas.

(Checking the law now, the boys were clearly accompanied, and I see no reason the bartender shouldn't have served them. I think it may have been forbidden before 2003, when the rules distinguished between children "at the bar" or not, rather than the current rules which distinguish between accompanied and unaccompanied children. But even then, the bartender would have been applying a 'rough city bar' approach to a posh village pub.)

Nice story! My father did the same thing as a kid, going to the bar to get beer for his father.

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