Retailers often ring up after the ‘sting’. Trading standards officers wear quite a few hats these days (not as many as you, but enough for them to turn up in a different guise on any given day). Sometimes they will use entrapment techniques. They like to call it ‘test purchasing’ and woe betide that you or your staff should make a mistake and sell one of the banned substances to someone underaged.
With this in mind Raj Patel, who runs RP Service Station in Glasgow, rang about a recent offer that came with his supplies of the Saturday Mirror. It was a free DVD of Educating Rita. Now this was a very entertaining film – Julie Walters and Michael Caine if I remember correctly – but it says on the DVD ‘not to be sold to anyone under 15’. “What am I supposed to do? Remove it if a kid comes in to buy the paper?” asks Raj.
According to the National Federation of Retail Newsagents, that’s probably the best advice.
It isn’t the type of test purchasing that a TSO would undertake, but of course, it only takes a busybody to complain and there will be an officer at your door.
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