London retailer
We are a responsible business and don't sell alcohol to anyone who we think is under 18. We also work with the police to make sure that youngsters aren't loitering in the shop. Alcohol accounts for a lot of our sales and we make good use of promotions on beer, wine and cider to drive volume. Retailers have a role to play in ensuring that young people under the age of 18 don't buy alcohol, but at the end of the day it is not up to us to police them. Sales of super-strength lager are high in our store and the majority of people who buy these products are in their 30s and 40s, so banning them would be pointless and would anger some of our customers.
More support needed Manchester retailer
There has been a serious crackdown on underage drinking recently in our area, so it is not worth any business risking selling alcohol to anyone under the age of 18. It's getting a lot harder to tell if a person is under 18 or not and it's difficult to turn youngsters away, especially when some kids in a group look older and some look a lot younger, which is why we have a Challenge 21 policy. Youths can also be very intimidating and it can be quite hard to turn people away who haven't got identification, but it's not worth losing our licence over. We would welcome more support from the police to help with gangs of youths who try to buy alcohol, though.
A ban is plain silly Bristol retailer
As long as shopkeepers don't sell alcohol to people under 18, or to customers who they think are buying it for young people, then we are doing our job properly. We should have the right to run promotions on alcohol in the same way we can for food because it gets people through the door. We tend to only run promotions on beers and wine though, because we can't compete with the big supermarkets on the price of popular spirits such as rum and vodka. We can't even control whether adults will drink responsibly the beverages they have bought in our shop. It is up to them, just as it is up to them if they want to buy super-strength lager or not, so the idea of banning products is silly.
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