My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [95]
“What, you couldn’t find someone whose eighteenth birthday is tomorrow?” I snap. “How about the center on the local high school basketball team? Just give him a cane and a fake beard and some orthopedic shoes.”
“What were you expecting?” Detective Lumpy snaps right back. “This is New York.”
He’s right: did I think they were going to send in Dorothy and Toto? Little Orphan Annie sucking a lollipop? Harry Potter?
“Besides,” he adds, “I didn’t need to do any of that. You were easy.” He tosses me the sheaf of paper and leaves. Out on the sidewalk, I watch him take out a Newport from the pack I just sold the boy in the oxford. Against the cobalt blue light of Brooklyn at dusk, its orange ember makes a brilliant contrast.
FOR YEARS NEW York has had this ridiculous rule about not carding people unless they look college age or younger, but now I understand it. In a sense, everyone in New York is adept at visually processing strangers’ faces in a matter of seconds. We do it in the subway, we do it on the sidewalk, we do it in bars and restaurants. What’s the difference between those situations and the couple of seconds you have at the register to decide whether someone falls into that eighteen-to-twenty-five threshold?
One difference is that if you screw up while selling cigarettes, you can wreck your business and lose your livelihood. Because in keeping with its treasured image as the city that makes nice to no one, New York City metes out merciless punishment against businesses caught selling tobacco to minors: the first violation costs a thousand dollars or so, which for a deli owner can easily amount to a week’s profits. The second, if incurred during a two-year probationary period, costs a few thousand more plus the loss of the tobacco license and potentially the lottery machine, which will wipe out most stores like ours.
Of course, nothing could be more honorable than preventing children from smoking. But if the goal is so important, why not simply force everyone who buys tobacco to show their ID, which would eliminate innocent mistakes?
Maybe because such a system would be too effective. Convenience store clerks will never card everyone unless they have to, because it slows down the checkout line and incites a surprising number of people to raise trouble (apparently because they resent being told they look young). However, since they don’t want to make a deadly mistake, either, clerks come up with elaborate rules for who and who not to card, like Has a walker. Talks about grandkids. Buys denture cream. Now, call me cynical, but something tells me this is exactly what Big Tobacco would want, to have the convenience store clerks of America deciding who does and doesn’t get access to tobacco. Such a system would be designed to fail at least part of the time, would it not? And who would benefit? The tobacco companies, for one, and the agencies giving out fines, for another, both of which get to make money from tobacco sales while looking rightfully concerned about teen smoking.
One late night after the sting, in a fit of conspiracy-minded pique, I do some heavy-duty Googling to see if my theory has merit. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I find a smoking gun proving that Big Tobacco induced the government of New York City (or anywhere else with a similarly self-defeating law) to knowingly create flawed regulations. However, I can tell you that since at least the mid-1990s tobacco companies have been enmeshed in the crafting of legislation governing youth access to tobacco, and one of the things they’ve pushed hardest against is mandatory age verification. Not surprisingly, they want to appear as if they’re deeply concerned about teen smoking, so they publicly support “retraining programs” to “educate” retailers on how to prevent underage sales. Rather creepily, in fact, Philip Morris and the tobacco companies