I am rather late with this - thinking about it it was over three weeks ago - but the next post topic is still playing out and I feel a need to put something in. So here we go - a rant about age restriction.
It seems Poundland - a chain of UK retail shops - has succumbed to the 'nanny state' ideas in the most complete and utter way possible - they are actually restricting dangerous items to higher ages than they have to by law. Wait, did I say 'dangerous items'? I meant 'useful common household tools and supplies', like screwdrivers and superglue. OK I'll set up the nice story for this.
Having got back to uni, I found bad packing meant some minor damage had occurred, and I needed to fix it. Superglue was (and is) the best option for this, so in a lunch breack I had a look around a couple of shops. Having only seen one behind a counter in one shop, and with little time before the lecture began, I left them, recalling pound shops do multiple tubes.
After the exam I went into the shop, found the nice 6-pack for £1, and took it to the counter.
"Can you prove you're over 21" (well it was more polite than that but I forget things)
Well, being 19, proving that would be difficult. Sadly I'm not (yet, at any rate) the kind of person to argue, at least not to checkout staff (who are really the 'grunts' of the big chains - no offence intended to any such person) about company policy, so I just left, although I did give some confused looks and such, which got the response 'you might glue your eyelids together.'
You see this is where it gets stupid. There are legal restrictions on superglue in the UK - 18 - for safety. A three year old with the stuff could cause no end of problems. But I'm not a three year old. A 15 year old might do something stupid on purpose. But I'm not a 15 year old, and I wouldn't say I look like the doing-something-stupid-on-purpose type. I fail to see what difference it makes with me being 19 (or 18) rather that 21. But this is Poundland's policy on all useful houshold items. At 18 I can poison my liver, destroy my lungs, get myself AIDs and even, should I have the money, send a ton or so of metal flying along at 70mph (and in the right place, I can send said metal past pedestrians only a few feet or maybe less away at as much as 60), but according to Poundland I can't fix broken things or tighten loose screws (insert comment about loose screws and the heads of Pondland here).
Yet it doesn't seem to apply to medicines which contain paracetamol. You know, that thing you can only buy 32 tablets of at once? They'll sell it to everyone, or at least that's what it seemed like when I had a cold in March. I'm not sure on Tobacco, having never smoked, but a chance glance around a new (to me, at least) store at home over Easter reveals something that the highly-moralled people may dislike - Poundland now sell Pornographic DVDs to over 18's. Yes, that's right. I can buy adult films (likely bad ones, simply because they're £1 each) but I can't get things I need to fix, say, a chair.
I didn't buy any adult films, because I didn't want any, but I did get some superglue - from another shop, who wanted me to be over 18. Shame I only got 1/6 of what I would have got in Poundland. Maybe I should go back and try and buy some again, just to make a point. Or maybe I should just spend the effort on speaking to people who I will see again.
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