There’s a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there’s a much bigger part that doesn’t want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those “I’ve become my dad” moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who’s ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I’m giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.