By Joe Broadmeadow
Somewhere in this great country, at every hour of every day, a corporation stands as the thin blue line between civilization and total collapse. For most of my life I assumed that was the job of the military and the police. I was wrong. It is Walmart.
I never fully appreciated the sacrifices this company makes to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors. Allow me to enlighten you.
On a recent trip to Arizona, my wife and I stopped at Walmart to stock our temporary residence with the essentials: coffee, snacks, beer, and wine. (There were a few other items but let us not pretend they mattered.)
Knowing the beer and wine would trigger an age check, which at seventy I find genuinely charming since the last person to seriously question my ID did so before disco died, we bypassed the indentured servitude stations they call self-checkout and went to a register staffed by an actual human being.
I set everything on the counter and stood at the ready, ID in hand, a model citizen.
This is where I received my education in the Walmart Policy on Alcohol Sales. The clerk, delightful whenever she could tear herself away from her phone, glanced at my license, performed the necessary arithmetic in her head (or gave a convincing impression of doing so), and handed it back.
Perfect. Cleared for takeoff.
Not so fast, sir. We do not cut corners here. She turned to my wife and asked for HER ID.
I beg your pardon?
Summoning the full weight of her Walmart security training, she explained, “We have to check all IDs in a group.”
I imagine my face did most of the talking, but I pressed on. “Why on earth would you need her ID?”
“Are you kidding me?”
Her expression, freshly restored by whatever she had been scrolling, answered for her.
“Could I please speak to the manager?”
The sigh came up from somewhere near her ankles as she went to find one.
The manager arrived, eyelashes first, the rest of her following about two seconds later. My wife, ever reasonable, produced the digital version of her license on her phone.
The manager shook her head. And here, at last, we reached the sacred heart of Walmart doctrine. I quote her exactly:
“Well, that’s okay for the police, but I have to be able to hold the license.”
I could feel my wife’s patience approaching a hard limit, the kind that occasionally does involve the police, but she held the line.
“All right,” I said, offering a diplomatic solution to this pressing matter of national security. “How about she walks out and I buy it myself?”
The horror on the manager’s face was something to behold. Her head began shaking in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. “No. Since we know you are together; we cannot sell it to you.”
“Fine. Take it off. Give me the rest. We are leaving.”
I paid for the harmless items and escorted my wife to the car before she could offer the manager a free seminar on the finer points of stupidity. Then I put on my sunglasses and the two-dollar hat I had purchased minutes earlier, strolled back inside, selected the exact same beer and wine, walked directly past the ever-vigilant manager (a woman apparently fluent in ID law but hopeless at surveillance), and bought it.
And civilization endured.
Now, I will grant that when a nineteen-year-old clerk cards a seventy-year-old man, there is a certain innocent logic to it. Rules are rules. But carding everyone in the group? What if I had shown up with my grandkids? Do they card the toddler in the cart?
The store sits near Arizona State University, so I assume they get a steady parade of resourceful but underage students trying to game the system. Fine. But come on.
If a kid is sharp enough to get into college, he is sharp enough to get around this. The group ID policy will be common knowledge before the freshmen have unpacked their extra-long twin sheets.
So here is to Walmart, whose new motto practically writes itself: “Good enough for the police, but not for us.”
Come to think of it, maybe we should put those managers in charge of our elections. Nobody is getting past that eyelash.
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