Convenience Stores Editing and Proofreading Services

A seventeen-year-old buys a bottle of wine at 9:40 on a Saturday. The staff member is nineteen, alone, and the customer is with three friends. Every store has a policy saying age-restricted products must not be sold to under-eighteens. Almost none of them give the person at the till the sentence to say, which is the only part of the policy that has to work under pressure.

We edit what convenience retailers produce — age-restricted sales policies and refusal procedures, till prompts and refusal register wording, staff training and induction material, security and lone working guidance, complaint and abuse reporting, licensing documentation and personal licence holder instructions, and the notices displayed to customers. Our editors work on procedures carried out by a teenager on their own.

The refusal script and the policy behind it is what actually prevents an illegal sale, and its failure is a rule with no words attached. Knowing the law is not the difficulty; saying no to four people at once is. We work through these so the challenge threshold is stated as a number the staff member applies rather than a judgement they make, since "if they look under 18" asks a nineteen-year-old to assess age and "if they look under 25, ask" removes the estimate entirely; so the words to use are written out and practised, because a refusal delivered badly escalates and one delivered as a script does not; so the refusal is framed as the shop's rule rather than the server's decision, given that "I'm not allowed to serve you without ID" removes the personal confrontation that "I don't think you're 18" creates; so what to do when pressed a second and third time is scripted too, as the first refusal is the easy one; so the point at which the staff member stops engaging and what they do instead is stated, with who to call and whether to leave the till; so the refusal is recorded with what to write, since the register is evidence and one-word entries are worthless; so the policy states plainly that no member of staff will ever be criticised for refusing a sale, because the fear of being wrong is what produces sales that should not happen; and so proxy purchase is addressed with its own script. Procedures written this way protect the licence and the person holding it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including policies, incident records and licensing correspondence. We are editors rather than licensing advisers or lawyers, and we offer no view on the law, licensing conditions or any incident. What we can do is give the person at the till the words.