Here’s an example of how a point of sale (POS) system fail for preventing underage sales
A store was fined in 2019 for selling to underage. Since the first infraction, the point of sale has been updated so employees cannot override the birthdate requirement. Identification must be scanned or a date of birth manually entered. Sounds good so far, the store had an issue, and they upgraded their point of sale system to check for underage.
Now the problem - the employee who sold the beverages entered his own birth date rather than check the ID of the agent. This is very common in the industry and a work easy works to invalidate the point of sale effectiveness in preventing underage sales.
What’s the result; the store’s license to sell alcohol was suspended for 30 days. Wow, that significant, with alcohol sales account for up to 50% of the profits for most convenience stores, this is a significant finial impact to the store.
The impacts keep on coming. The store owner has to appear in front of the country council and be called out for this. He had to apologize publicly. Additionally, this made the local news and national news.
So we have – loss of sales, public humiliation, legal fees, and reputation hits, all from a simple bypass of the point system, So what can we do about this? --
The industry needs id scanning solutions that are robust, simple to use, have advanced technology, and meet emerging standards. Minor Decliner id scanners have that solution set right now for age verification for id checking.
How does it work. 1st, the Minor Decliner id checker / id scanner reviews the id by scanning the barcode. We check for invalid and expired. Certain fake ids are detected .his way. Then we give a sale / no sale answer and record this is in the compliance log. This takes less than a second, so there is not extra work.
2nd , Minor Decliner is future ready by having the available to read digital drivers licenses and to work with digital identity tokens like the National Association of Convivence stores (NACS) Truage™ protocol . The system gives you an added layer of protection and the assurance of meeting future standards for stands of age verification.
Here is how you can get your compliance rate to 100% - Redundancy. For mission critical items it is a standard industry practice to have redundancy. This explains why you need to present your id multiple times at the airport.
By having an independent, redundant system, you can make sure you never sell to a underage. Minor Decliner is so easy to implement . Out of the box and power on operation. Easy to implement with no internet required.
In closing , POS systems can be subject to easy work around’s for age verification. It like having a bank vault with a back door propped open. Minor Decliners stand-alone id scanners can give your operation the confidence to have a redundant system to insure sure you don’t hit the news to seeking to minors.