Re: tobacco sales

This is certainly an intriguing issue, since most tobacco is legal in most
places for most people to purchase, it seems to me that unless the vendor is
in some sort of specialty niche, then likely a rather large number of his
clients may be attempting to buy when they should not for one reason or
another.

Of course one big difference between snagging Mom or Dad's credit card
number to access a porn site versus buying an actual product is the issue of
delivery.  The porn content is generally delivered immediately, while a
product will take a certain amount of time and introduces the risk for the
child that a parent or guardian will receive it instead.

I think of these things because I have pre-teen children who can already
think up ways to get into trouble that I would NEVER have dreamed up.  Even
eternal vigilance may not be enough.

I guess, although tobacco products are legal, I would have a small moral
issue with selling them at all, and I think that the age verification issue
could become a huge technical/legal issue very quickly.  Would one have to
use an age verification system of some sort?  That would tend to associate
the vendor with porn sites, which he or she may or may not want.  Also there
is the HUGE issue of remitting taxes, and the fact that the legal age to
purchase can vary so much from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.  Overall, nope,
I don't think it would be worth the hassle.

T. Floyd
--
T. Floyd
admin(at)pineloft.com
http://pineloft.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rachel Hartman" <rhartman(at)io.com>
To: <hwg-business(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 03, 2000 8:51 AM
Subject: RE: tobacco sales


: At 01:18 AM 5/3/00 -0400, Jason Brett wrote:
:
: >Malcom, you've got a good point about facilitating sales to minors. But
if
: >you bear in mind that in order to make an online purchase, you need to
(in
: >most cases) use a major credit card. I don't know many minors who have
their
: >own credit card, and most of those who do have one have a second card on
a
: >parent's account.
:
: I'm not sure that's a strong enough deterrent.  On another mailing list
I'm
: on, a member wrote about her experiences working for a collections company
: whose clients included companies dealing in X-rated
materials--pay-per-view
: movies, web sites, etc.  [snip of good stuff for brevity]
:
: So if the kids will commit credit card fraud for porn, what's to stop them
: from doing it for tobacco?

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