Establishing whether customers are old enough to buy a certain product has long been one of the most challenging elements of working in a grocery store. It’s awkward, potentially confrontational and comes with a good chance that customers could be cross, offended or both. 2024 research by the Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) showed that requests for customer identification are the second most common cause of assaults on frontline staff.
Staff rarely get much in the way of training as to the best way of approaching this, and it’s a situation that is only going to get more complex. With ever-increasing compliance requirements – more product categories, more age thresholds, more regulatory pressure – how can grocery stores verify age without impacting the customer experience and without compromising privacy, writes Nicolas Sierro, Product Manager, Privately SA.
Age thresholds
Grocery stores already navigate different age thresholds depending on the product at the till. It’s 18-plus for tobacco and vapes, Challenge 25 for alcohol, and potentially a 16-plus requirement for energy drinks still under discussion. The UK Tobacco and Vapes Bill, expected to come into force in 2027, adds further complexity.
This is a generational ban requiring retailers to assess not just whether a customer appears old enough, but when they were born. All this, applied consistently across a busy store with variable staffing and high turnover, is a major operational challenge.
Furthermore, the penalty for failing to meet these requirements is substantial. Under the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, retailers selling without a licence in England and Wales could face unlimited fines in court, or fixed penalty notices of £2,500. Trading Standards officers also now have the power to issue on-the-spot fines and confiscate illegal stock directly from premises.
Beyond the immediate financial hit, serious cases involving repeated non-compliance could result in court-ordered bans on premises operating as vape shops altogether. For larger retail groups operating across multiple sites, the stakes are higher still, given that liability can multiply across a portfolio if systemic failures in age verification training or process are identified.
Then there is the problem of Fake IDs. A survey of 15-16-year-olds across North West England revealed that 28.3% of those who drank reported having bought their own alcohol. One seventh of these owned at least one form of fake identification.
Age verification challenges
The direction of travel is clearly towards tougher penalties, more rigorous inspection, and less tolerance for procedural gaps. This puts additional pressure on staff. It can be uncomfortable to ask a customer their age, and even more so to refuse a sale. Some customers will take the decision in good faith, but plenty more will not.
There is also the question of speed and customer experience. In modern life, people are always in a hurry, and if a staff member gets embroiled in a lengthy debate about age on a busy Saturday afternoon, then both the person at the till and those in the queue might easily get frustrated.
The answer lies in automation.
Automated age verification
Automated age verification is not a new idea, and cloud-connected systems have been available for years. These are imperfect, though – slow, internet-dependent and a privacy risk for the customer – and new systems have emerged that work just as effectively offline.
Speed is just as essential with automated age checks as it is with manual, and adding even seconds to a transaction is not ideal. Facial age estimation can be completed in less than a second. And most customers complete the check themselves without cashier involvement; the system is running in conjunction with the transaction rather than interrupting it.
Not all grocery stores have strong connectivity. This means that cloud-dependent age verification will perform less well when the store is busy, in a rural area or in an older retail premises where network infrastructure has not been updated. A system that relies on a live connection to process an age check will either stall the queue or default to letting the transaction through when connectivity drops. Neither outcome is acceptable. Customers know how facial data or ID data can be collected and misused, and there is an important distinction between facial recognition and facial age estimation, which asks a single yes-or-no question and discards everything used to answer it. The latter will never store, manage or share facial data.
The future
Tech is changing the grocery store in countless ways but it is always important to work with a store and not against it. Having a system that makes an objective determination and escalates to a human only when it cannot, removes the pressure from whoever is working at the till. Inconsistency in age checks is rarely deliberate. It tends to be a product of discomfort, time pressure, or uncertainty about the rules.
A system that oversees the determination consistently and produces an auditable log of every check and its outcome puts retailers in a much stronger position, as and when compliance queries emerge. Surely that’s easier than leaving it to your staff?
Comments are closed.