Lots of people refused service in a supermarket.

I worked on the checkout in a supermarket for a bit in my first year at uni. It was really hard on your back trying to scan cases of beer while seated. Maybe that was the issue.

I find it very difficult to believe that tesco put an employee on the tills with a sign next to them saying no alcohol served at this till due to religious reasons.

I find it unlikely that someone is so devout that they cannot even handle alcohol when it’s in sealed containers. I could be wrong here though. One of my minions is Muslim, I’ll ask him for his experiences of how common this or isn’t when he’s not showing as ‘away’ on Teams.

I find it hard to believe that someone so devout that they cannot handle alcohol even when it’s in sealed containers would apply for a job in Tesco where they might be requested to do exactly that, along with handling other potentially problematic products.

I find it hard to believe that Tesco would take someone so devout that they cannot handle alcohol even when it’s in sealed containers and place them on a checkout where they might be pressured into doing exactly that.

I find it absolutely inconceivable that not only all this allegedly occurred but they would then stick up a “warning: Moslem” (or even Muslim) Sign of Shame informing everyone of this, it’s an outrageous situation. If this genuinely happened then someone needs to lose their job over that. And I don’t mean the girl on the checkout. Has your father complained?

On the other hand, I find it rather easier to believe that someone might make up such a tale for a bit of fury-erupting goodness.

There wasn’t but the young lass on the till was only 17

There’s been a few posts similar to this. If someone is underage and needs to process alcohol or other restricted items then they put their little light on and a supervisor / assistant comes over and approves it. I’ve seen it happen many, many times over the years. No fuss, no drama, no badly spelt signs.

Over 200 stories have been written about just three known separate incidents in five years.

200? That’s not even mildly frothy compared to the BBC not planning on having a choir on #covidproms

Did the OP’s dad get confused when he saw the 10 items or less sign at the express checkout?

I hope he objected to it not reading “ten items are fewer.”

. If someone is underage and needs to process alcohol or other restricted items then they put their little light on and a supervisor / assistant comes over and approves it.

Not when I were a lad.
It were all mechanical tills then that you had to find the adhesive price sticker and type the price in. No barcode scanners to flag up prohibited items or itemised receipts and no way for the supermarket to prove that a supervisor had signed it off (other than initialling the paper till roll but that didn’t really prove anything)
It was just easier to put up a sign rather than risk losing the store’s alcohol licence.

I once bought alcohol from a Tesco. True story.

It was so busy that all the checkouts had huge queues but not a single person was just in for bread and milk?

I smell bullshit.

Doing a temporary stint at a local Tescos thanks to covid affecting my business (thanks for the job Tesco! Impressive what they did), I can confirm from my limited but still recent and decent experience that ~70% of my transactions didn’t have alcohol

As far as i am aware it is Tesco policy that employees who cannot handle items such as alcohol do not work on the till.

Three pints and bottle of mouthwash was about my limit. After that I start scanning my tongue and giggling.

I find it hard to believe that someone so devout that they cannot handle alcohol even when it’s in sealed containers would apply for a job in Tesco where they might be requested to do exactly that, along with handling other potentially problematic products.

When you need a job you take what you can get.

I find it hard to believe that Tesco would take someone so devout that they cannot handle alcohol even when it’s in sealed containers and place them on a checkout where they might be pressured into doing exactly that.

If they didn’t, they would be in violation of the equality act.

Close it ….. everything after Kilo had jumped the shark.

20 years ago my mate Will used to work behind a till in Tesco Buckingham. He used to pass the beer over without scanning it so we could get drunk for free. He wasn’t Muslim and he also died very young.

Makes you think.

My point is that religious people of whatever flavour choose the bits they like and are total hypocrites about the rest.

My point is that bigots of whatever flavour choose the bits they hate and are total hypocrites about the rest

That buzzfeed article is worth a read incidentally. I’d recommend everyone read it before posting here.

Exactly. £4 bottle of wine, does that actually exist?

The story was about how Lee Saunders, 35, was refused sale of a £4 bottle of wine by a Muslim worker at Tesco in the London suburb of Feltham, due to her “religious beliefs”.

One of my minions is Muslim

One of my minions is Muslim

Grougar

A Indian restaurant in town wouldn’t serve alcohol but they allowed you to bring your own with corkage fee, you had to pour it yourself. Didn’t feel it was odd as they chose not to touch it due their religion.

Does this mean the lady in question would refuse to sell or use hand sanitizer?

I doubt she really understand her own religious teaching.
I come from a Moslem country where Moslem works in 7-Eleven with an alcohol section for non-Moslem consumers. The law there is that alcohol must not be sold to Moslem nor for them to consume but can be sold to non-Moslem.
Once there was a similar incident where a Moslem woman refused to sell a bottle of beer to an Indian person and the whole incident went viral online. The religious authority had to step in to explain that selling to non-Moslem is fine as the Moslem woman (she is not the owner of 7-eleven) is just an employee selling to non-Moslem.

Why are you spelling it Moslem? None of the Muslims I know would spell or pronounce it like that.

Why are you spelling it Moslem? None of the Muslims I know would spell or pronounce it like that.

Both are fine as I normally prefer Muslim but certain people write them as Moslem. To be consistent with OP I just write Moslem to avoid confusion. Most in Islamic countries tend to use the term Muslim rather than Moslem. The latter seem to be recent phenomena.

All part of the trolling I would suspect but best not to interact really.

Why are you spelling it Moslem?

Don’t feed the Troll

Both are fine as I normally prefer Muslim but certain people write them as Moslem. To be consistent with OP I just write Moslem to avoid confusion. Most in Islamic countries tend to use the term Muslim rather than Moslem. The latter seem to be recent phenomena.

Both really aren’t fine. Muslim Council of Britain requested that the Daily Mail stopped spelling it like that when they were the last media hold out in 2004. Would you call a black person a negro?

Phonetically, the arabic word pronounced ‘Muslim’ means someone devoted to god. ‘Moslem’ means someone ‘evil or unjust’. So there is a bit of a difference, I’d say.

Was she selling any Ray guns?

Perhaps she was worried about the Lazer from the scanner*

*niche joke for STW long serving members with good memories and tendency to join in on weird threads

Oh shit chewkw has turned up, its only going downhill from here. close it now!!

So I spoke with my Muslim colleague. At length, I’ve just got off the phone in fact. I’ll try and distil an hour and a half into a paragraph.

The crux of it was “these aren’t things we’re supposed to hate.” He said that someone objecting to handling alcohol in the manner the OP describes could probably happen but would very much be in a minority. He told me if he’d encountered this situation he’d have given her a bit of religious coaching [my terminology, I forget how he phrased it but basically suggesting to her that she’d got it wrong] and tell her that the she was there to do a job and should be doing it.

So there you go. Straight from the mouth of one of your actual Muslims and one of the nicest blokes it’s ever been my pleasure to know, relayed to you by a grumpy white atheist who likes to argue with strangers on the Internet. HTH.

Is he a shiite, sufi, sunni, wahabi? I suspect that there is no such thing as muslim anymore than there is a Christian. Christians don’t agree on the sacrament, why would islam be any different?
That’s even if you exclude the Saudis that deplane in Bahrain and make straight for the alcohol but won’t let their wives or daughters drive. People, eh?

To be fair it doesn’t really matter whether (we think) her personal beliefs accord with (what we understand of) her religion and what a majority of her Muslim peers would do. She has a strongly-held personal belief and her work is accommodating that.

FWIW I don’t think that’s any more or less reasonable than believing in a Christian God with zero evidence. In fact I’ll go a step further – alcohol is kinda bad for individuals and society as a whole so that particular belief seems more rational to me ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯

Phonetically, the arabic word pronounced ‘Muslim’ means someone devoted to god. ‘Moslem’ means someone ‘evil or unjust’. So there is a bit of a difference, I’d say.

That’s new to me as I thought it was just a western pronunciation with the same meaning.

Oh shit chewkw has turned up, its only going downhill from here. close it now!!

😆

In light of recent events (that other thread wot I closed) I’ll be watching this very carefully, but if it interferes with my movie night then I’m pulling the trigger.

but if it interferes with my movie night t

Passion of the Christ or Submission?

Wonder what would have happened if all the checkout personnel were muslims & took the same stance, & then the self service checkouts got overloaded with work?
I’d go somewhere else.

A lad I worked with in the prison service was a devout muslim. Until he went on any ‘works do’ then he wasn’t as devout as earlier on in the evening.

Debbie does dallas?

That’s new to me as I thought it was just a western pronunciation with the same meaning.

It was until not too long ago largely due to western conceit/ignorance. Then people who actually spoke arabic pointed out the difference. Someone who spoke arabic explained it to me once, it’s pretty complicated. I didn’t entirely understand it at the time and don’t remember most of it but Moslem is related to different tenses of darkness and unjust or is a verb for one and adjective for the other or something. So yeah, muslim is someone who submits to the will of God, Moslem is dark and unjust or some variation

Debbie does dallas?

Original or remake?

The latter seem to be recent phenomena.

No, it’s an old one. And when pronounced by English speaking people, it sounds very insulting to people who understand Arabic. It might have propped up recently in the bits of the internets where being ‘accidentally’ insulting about Muslims is seen as fun… I’d suggest avoiding that stuff and not spreading it.

So I spoke with my Muslim colleague. At length, I’ve just got off the phone in fact. I’ll try and distil an hour and a half into a paragraph.

Someone in your HR department is currently having palpitations that you have just asked a Muslim to explain the actions of all other Muslims and managed to keep this conversation going for 90 minutes…

Is he a shiite, sufi, sunni, wahabi?

I’ve no idea. I’ll ask him if you can convince me it’s relevant to anything.

Someone in your HR department is currently having palpitations that you have just asked a Muslim to explain the actions of all other Muslims and managed to keep this conversation going for 90 minutes…

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I spent 90 minutes going “yes… right… uh-huh…” as it was a subject he loves to talk about and I couldn’t get him off the phone. And I didn’t ask him to “explain all Muslims,” I asked him what his experiences were.

Most UK muslims are sunni. Asking if he’s wahabi seems a bit odd given what Cougar said about his responses – it’s kinda like asking a Christian if they are Westboro Baptists.

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.

Coolest story EVAH!

Same happened to me buying Nanny State at 2300 in Cumbernauld. Unlike your lazy arse I did go and find out and it would appear (after reading the label or something) that it’s classified as alcohol for VAT purposes despite probably having less than a bottle of shandy.

Did I shit in someone’s cornflakes on Monday or something?

No, it was a bowl of popcorn.

Oh ****!

MAAARK!