Confronting a grocery store with its promise to pay shoppers a bonus if they find any products with expired freshness dates, two enterprising teens turned a 7 000 kroner ($1 030) profit by loading up shopping carts with out-of-date beer they weren’t old enough to buy.
The boys, ages 14 and 15, got their reward despite being underage, the Oslo daily Verdens Gang reported on Tuesday.
To promote the freshness of its products, the Norwegian grocery store chain Kiwi offers to pay customers the retail price of any product they find that is past its ”best by” date.
So the teens, whose names were not released, started checking at a store on the outskirts of Oslo and found 280 cans of Carlsberg beer that were out of date. They promptly loaded the 500ml cans into shopping carts on Monday evening and demanded their reward from the cashier.
Clerks at the store weren’t sure what to do, since the boys were under 18, the minimum age for buying beer in Norway. They called their parents and the police.
All of them determined that the boys had not tried to buy the beer or take it out of the store, so they had done nothing wrong and were entitled to the reward. Alcohol is heavily taxed in Norway, pushing the retail price for each can they found up to 25 kroner ($3,67).
”The store did everything it was supposed to do,” Kiwi’s regional manager, Bjarne Sand, told the newspaper. ”Everything was fine.”
When contacted by telephone, Sand confirmed that the newspaper story was correct but declined further comment. — Sapa-AP