At 11:39 AM 8/7/96 EST, jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca wrote:

I've seen the same problem in a department store in Ottawa. They would not accept a Canadian Passport as identification for payment by cheque but would accept various credit cards and similar devices.

My conclusion was that they wanted something that would show my friend's credit worthiness, not prove his identity.

Being employed by a department store, and working closely with our trainers and our loss prevention people, for the last ten years has given me a pretty good vantage point into seeing what actually happens on the sales floor as well as what goes into the policy manual. I'd suggest that it's probably an oversight by their training department. Their trainers are just humans that looked around one day and said, "we need to define what an ID is." They Xeroxed a couple of dummied-up driver's licenses and provincial ID cards, pasted them in a book, and said, "there, that looks like all the acceptable ID I've ever seen around here." Using passports as internal ID is not a common occurrance, and this usage probably simply didn't occur to the trainers. It almost certainly was not the "fault" of the person on the sales floor; they're usually trained to look at these pretty pictures in a procedures book, and deny anything else. That said, it certainly *could* be true that their loss prevention or credit or audit departments decided that only "credit-worthy" people should be able to write checks. On the whole, though, I have been finding that people ascribe all sorts of paranoid evils to all sorts of organizations, when the ultimate truth usually starts out more like a Dilbert cartoon. Internally, I can usually spot the truly evil corporate deception practices. Externally, though, people can only make guesses based on actions that they've become party to. And who can blame someone for that? John -- J. Deters "Captain's log, stardate 25970-point-5. I am nailed to the hull." +-------------------------------------------------------+ | NET: jad@dsddhc.com (work) jad@pclink.com (home) | | PSTN: 1 612 375 3116 (work) 1 612 894 8507 (home) | | ICBM: 44^58'33"N by 93^16'42"W Elev. ~=290m (work) | | PGP Key ID: 768 / 15FFA875 | +-------------------------------------------------------+