My Mother, The Crusader November 29, 2011

Happy Holidays everyone. With the passing of Thanksgiving I’ve decided to spend several times over the month sharing some of my favorite gaming related Christmas shopping memories. I want to share another quick story with all of you from a few years back.

Like many people, I will usually have a few video games on my Christmas shopping list. My family knows next to nothing about technology so they usually just prefer that I write down specifically any gifts I may want so they can show it to a store clerk who may be able to make heads or tails of it. This doesn’t always work, however, as I’ve still had to return a few gifts that were incorrectly picked out by a clerk, but its fine for the general majority of things I’ve asked for. After Christmas ended a few years ago and I had some new games to play, my mother had a shopping story she just had to tell me.

The story, as my mother told it, was that the clerks at the register knew that what my mother was buying wasn’t for her. So they asked her very calmly if whoever she was buying the game for was old enough to play it. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Even though I am not under the age of eighteen, I do not agree with mandatory ID checks on people when buying movie tickets, video games or music. There’s no law against buying video games at any age like there is with alchohol or tobacco (in fact all attempts to make these laws have outright failed since they violate the first amendment) so its just store-enforced age discrimination, which to me is quite immoral. Sometimes if I do get carded when buying something I’ll just up and leave the store with the unpurchased item still on the clerk’s conveyor belt. I figure they should have a reality check on just how many lost sales those policies will give them.

When my mother was confronted with a clerk spouting this policy to her (a woman in her mid 50s) she told me she looked at the guy with an odd face and said, “Yes, and he’s old enough to buy the beer to go along with it.” and left. When she told me this story I broke out laughing. I guess these sentements run in the family.