PostedJuly 1, 2022, 2:03 p.m.
Blue Cross sued the two distributors after finding that minors could easily buy alcohol online.
All you have to do is provide a means of payment and lie about your age to be able to order alcohol from most online stores in Switzerland.
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Today, it is difficult for minors to buy alcohol in stores. Vendors are trained to check their age if in doubt, says Blue Cross, and underage purchase tests fail in most cases. But it’s not at all the same when it comes to ordering online. The organization which helps dependent people has, from February to April, ordered alcohol online by young people aged between 13 and 17 years.
They placed these orders with eight online stores, including those of Coop, Denner or food suppliers such as Uber Eats. 83% of online orders were accepted, the same for 48 of the 49 food suppliers. To place an order, young people in most cases only had to provide a Twint account or a prepaid credit card and lie about their age. Six of the eight online stores have no strict measures to verify the age of the customer. This is not the case with Galaxus, unlike its parent company Migros, which asks to enter a code from its identity card or passport. Attempts to order alcohol by minors have all failed at this vending machine.
Gin delivered to an 11-year-old child
The delivery people also do not check the age of the person to whom they bring alcohol. The Blue Cross verified this in another test, an 11-year-old child being given a bottle of gin in particular. Last Wednesday, the Swiss Addiction Foundation published a study which arrives at the same conclusions: 94% of the young people concerned were able to order alcohol illegally on the internet and 89% of young people aged 13 were given the alcohol directly by the delivery man.
The Blue Cross had published its results in mid-May, hoping that this would make retailers react. But that was not the case. As a result, the organization is moving up a gear and this week initiated criminal proceedings against two of the biggest alcohol sellers, Coop and Denner, a subsidiary of Migros, we learn from the «NZZ». The law on alcohol provides for fines of up to 40,000 francs for those who sell alcohol to minors and the Penal Code for a prison sentence of up to 3 years.
Denner and Coop say they want to act
Denner and Coop reacted by telling the newspaper that they intended to quickly put in place new processes for verifying the age of the customer. But no specific date has been given.
The NZZ further states that one of the liquor vendors outright threatened Blue Cross with legal action against her. The organization did not want to say who it was, but it accuses him of having incited young people to commit a crime and of having made fakes by lying about their age.