No age limit on buying cigarettes in 70's
I remember being 9 or 10 and getting a pack of cigarettes for my brothers or parents in NYC. There wasn't an age restriction until the late 80's/early 90's in NY I think.
shareI am not sure if there was an age restriction in NY back in the 80s/90s. I think most store owners used judgement. When I was 8 or 9 I remember a kid who was probably 11 try to buy a pack and the man behind the counter asked who they were for, when the kid said for his mom they sold them to him. When I was 13 and had an off the books summer job my boss would ask me to get them for him, I told him he might want to write a note. The store where I bought them never asked to see the note and always sold them to me. The first time I told the guy working behind the counter I had a note, he said its OK and gave me a facial expression as if it was not necessary at all.
shareI remember they started to get strict on the age thing when I was in HS back in the early 90's. I remember I could get cigs when I was 15, but when I was 16 I had to either hope they didn't card me or get one of the seniors to get them for me. Use to get one of them to get a carton for 20 bucks I think back than. One of the ladies at a corner store didn't figure out I was just turned 18 and she had been selling to me for a year or so. Beer on the other hand was a pain to get. Though I was one of the few who could grow a beard in HS so I could some times get away without being carded.
shareBeer was much tougher to get than cigarettes. However, you could usually find a store/bodega that did not card. I grew up in NYC and there were a couple places we would always go to. Since in NYC most teens did not drive and simply walked to their friends house (or took a cab) there was no real danger of kids drunk driving. A teen drunk driving death was and still is the biggest fear a bar/store has of being linked to. Since that was the case in NYC most store owners did not care until the cops started cracking down, but that did not happen until the mid-90s.
shareWhen I was in high school my junior year I spent a few weeks at my grandparent's house and babysat the boy across the street for a little extra money. His dad smoked and sent him to the little store around the corner for cigs all the time and always had him get an extra pack for me too, lol. He was around 8 or 9. This was in a smallish Texas town in '88. The employees probably knew him. When the real crackdown on smoking started I thought about how easy it was less than ten years before to get them. Now it takes an act of congress!
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