It's not as weird as, say, Morgellons.
My cousin was a narc in college. She thought it would help her get into the FBI, if I remember right. I learned about it in a strange and not wholly comfortable conversation years later.
I had no idea anybody ever did spot checks for compliance like that. I thought the liquor control people would do a sting only after complaints or something. I don't know why I thought that.
It is compelling, though it's the writing as much as the story. (Well done, Rotters.) I wonder sometimes how various pieces of my life would come across in the hands of a skilled writer.
We used to do that "bootlegging" thing back in high school, except, for some reason, we called it "pimping"; some weird midwestern slang we misinterpreted from a tv show, no doubt. However, it was quite successful, and looking back at it now, astonishing how many adults just went along with it.
Also, back then, I can't imagine being carded for smokes. Just wasn't done.
Hey! Someone writing about a job!
Speaking of underage kids buying smokes, relatedly, it can be amusing to fuck with the ones buying an apple. No teenager in the history of the world has bought an apple at 7-11 for eating. The look on their face when you ask them where they're going to go smoke is priceless.
I had no idea a 7-11 ever sold fresh fruit.
(I worked a high school job with the cops -- as an actual intern, not a narc -- and his description of the eclectic mixture of cop-types he encounters really brings back memories.)
4: I believe policies vary by state and municipality. Around here, it seems like they mostly only do it after complaints, or if they are trying to "get" someone, but then occasionally the Basij licensing inspectors have a compliance crackdown where they target a neighborhood or type of retailer.
Sarcastic tag close fail! O noes!
'... So why were you doing it?'
15 reminded me of this:
All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him hang around
Out of kindness I suppose
'... So why were you doing it?'
To be like Johnny Depp?
A neighbor runs our local ABC store and I think two of his daughters had a gig like this. Great story.
'... So why were you doing it?'
Future page hits.
Oh gawd, this reminded me of something I hadn't thought about in ages. When I worked for the state government in Deep Redstatia, one of the girls in my trainee class got assigned to doing compliance checks for the department of social services: basically, trying to buy non-compliant foods with WIC coupons. I think of that job now as being a lot more morally ambiguous than I did then, bright-eyed technocratic neoliberal that I was. This girl was eager and surprisingly good at her job. Despite being a college-educated good girl from a bourgeois family, she dressed herself up like white trash, dangled a (never lit) cigarette from her lips, and affected the air of a teenage mother (she looked young for her age) as she put the bag of corn chips or the two-liter of coke on the belt with the bread and milk.
10 is exactly right and 8 is exactly hilarious.
Basically no one starts smoking after the age of 18 or so, so I am pretty much OK with draconian enforcement on underage cigarette smoking.
I wonder if that is true. I had used tobacco maybe six times before I was 18 and then I started. I suppose you could say those six times were crucial for me starting, but I don't know that any prohibition can stop such incidental use.
Anecdotally, everyone I know who smokes, and whose time of starting smoking I know, started smoking before they were 18.
The ONS says "Two-thirds (66 per cent) of adults who were either current smokers or who had smoked regularly at some time in their lives had started smoking before they were 18 year of age. Almost two-fifths (39 per cent) had started smoking regularly before the age of 16". So I was overstating things rather. Sorry.
So I can still sell loose cigarettes outside the junior high with your approval?
I started smoking well after I turned eighteen. With the exception of tobacco mixed with hash, I don't think I'd smoked the hard stuff until I was twenty.
I started smoking well after I turned eighteen. With the exception of tobacco mixed with hash, I don't think I'd smoked the hard stuff until I was twenty.
The only plausible exceptions to the posited rule I can come up with are people who get a taste for/become addicted to tobacco via joints.