Lashings of ginger beer

I was in the supermarket earlier, and I bought myself a bottle of ginger beer. Not your cheap rubbish fizzy ginger beer that's bazically, ginger-ade, but proper brewed stuff made my the fantastic Fentimans. I never used to like ginger beer much, as I'm not a huge fan of ginger, but I'm currently drinking quite a lot of it. I'm nearly at the point where I actually enjoy it rather than just thinking "Euurggh".

The young chap working on the checkout looked to be approximately 10 years old - I guess his real age may have been higher, but he was certainly under 18 for reasons which will become clear. He scanned my items through, one by one until he reached the ginger beer and at this point he became slightly confused. U18s are allowed to sell alcohol to people in the supermarket, but they need to get a supervisor to ok it (and verify that I look over 18, which I do).

The look of confusion on his face made me suspect that he may not have come across ginger beer before, and was unaware that it is a soft drink that you could give to children such as the Famous Five. They pretty much lived off the stuff, at least when they were out having an adventure.

So the lad asked me "Is this alcoholic?". What I should have said in reply, to save time, was "No! It's fine! Stick it through, young master!" and that would have been the end of it. But, what I actually said was "It's got a little bit of alcohol in it - 0.5%". This is true - the brewing process used does cause it to have a slight (but pretty negligible) alcohol content. He didn't appear to be understand, possibly because I'd used the word "percent", so he repeated the question, and I repeated my answer. He still looked a little confused, so he rang his little bell to get a supervisor over, just in case.

She duly came over, and looked at the bottle of ginger beer, and then appeared to be confused herself as to why this was being queried. so she nodded it through. And that was that. I paid and left.

The moral of this slightly weak story is: Sometimes you can save a little time by telling white lies to supermarket checkout assistants.