Oh, I have a mildly boring Tesco / alcohol tale.
Years ago, I went to Tesco to buy amongst other things some alcohol-free beer. As I recall, my then-girlfriend was on antibiotics at the time. This was like 1am and back in the day when licensing laws restricted alcohol sales to certain times of the day but I figured, alcohol free right?
Got to the checkout with an armful of Becks Blue only to be told they couldn’t sell me alcohol. I pointed out that it was alcohol free, she went “oh yeah” and scanned it, to be met with ‘computer says no.’ I protested, she dragged over a supervisor.
The supervisor told me that, even though it was alcohol-free, there would actually be traces of alcohol in the beer and that’s why they couldn’t sell it to me. I pointed out the tub of “vodka and chilli” pasta sauce that they’d already processed quite happily and offered to go and get a few bottles of shandy down for her to try and scan, to which she replied, “I’ll get the manager.”
I declined. I figured there’s probably not a lot a store manager could do to override what is presumably a barcode cataloguing error and in any case they probably had better things to be doing at 1am. Besides which, it wasn’t sufficiently big a deal to be making a fuss about.
They gave me their customer services address which was somewhere in Glasgow, I was going to write to them not as a complaint – both staff were lovely and agreed with me that it was just a bit odd – but out of curiosity as to whether this was intentional and what the reasoning was. Then apathy inevitably set in and I never bothered.