My passport card won't scan. A clerk called it 'law.'

I was at the checkout at Harris Teeter, the grocery store, buying alcohol for someone else. I'm a gig worker on the Instacart app, which means I buy things for other people, and buying alcohol means showing ID. So I showed mine: a passport card, in the card holder that hangs from the chain wallet I wear around my neck.

The associate insisted I take it out of the holder so they could scan it. I told them it doesn't scan. They said they had to scan it, because the cameras were looking at them. I said, well, this is a passport card, so it's not going to scan; you need to put it in manually. They said they couldn't. I said, then you need to get somebody who can.

They called someone over. She wasn't a manager or anything else, just another associate with a password. Then I was told they had to scan it as well. "It's Harris Teeter law," I was told, and then, really quickly, a correction: policy. I gave her the card. She tried to scan it, saw that she couldn't, and simply put it in manually, which I know is something they absolutely can do.

The whole thing held me up about five minutes. I'm a business owner, and I run several businesses; one of them is Instacart, through my LLC. When you work for yourself, time is everything, and I don't like being held up for things that are unnecessary.

I live in Virginia Beach, and wearing the passport card is a choice. I keep my driver's license in the car, because that's where it's most needed and where I think it belongs. Virginia won't let you hold both a state ID card and a driver's license, but you can have a passport card, a passport and a driver's license. If I have other IDs, why should I carry my license when I don't need it?

A passport card is a real, legal ID. It just doesn't scan. Even the Instacart verification system, which can scan passports and driver's licenses, for some reason can't scan the passport card. And this wasn't a one-off. I've been running into it for several years, at several stores. It's anecdotal, but it's anecdotal with multiple counts of evidence, and several times people have told me something is the law when it's really store policy.

Law versus policy

The wording is only part of the problem. The bigger part is the insisting: getting angry and pushing back so confidently when they don't know what they're talking about. Typing an ID in by hand isn't something they can get in legal trouble for. It's not a law. It's an in-store policy, and that difference really needs to be made clear to the people saying it.

When they say "have to," it isn't because there's no other way around it. It's because they're afraid of what their supervisor, their manager or corporate is going to say, because they think they're being watched on camera. To me it's dystopian that store workers are so afraid of their employers they can't simply explain that a legal ID won't scan and type it in by hand.

To me it's dystopian that store workers are so afraid of their employers they can't simply explain that a legal ID won't scan and type it in by hand.

That should be part of training at the corporate level of Harris Teeter and other organizations: This is not law, this is our policy. The people higher up should also be open to customers explaining that not every ID can be scanned, even legally valid ones. Exceptions need to be made. As it is, it's like they're just throwing these people into these jobs.

Passed down the line

I can't verify what the company teaches. But for someone to tell me something that wrong, that it's the law and there's no other way to process my ID, they must have heard it from someone. When people in different stores say the same thing, it's in the company culture somehow, passed down the chain of command. Who told you that's the law? Haven't you ever been to a store yourself and used an ID that didn't work? I don't mind being connected with this criticism. If someone from Harris Teeter thinks I've gotten it wrong, they can get in touch with me.

There's a scene in the movie "Redbelt" that shows exactly this. Chiwetel Ejiofor's character, Mike Terry, gets called onto a set by Chet Frank, an actor playing an actor. Chet has Mike look at the script, with lines like "dark 30" and "ass on curb." What does that mean, ass on curb? Is that something somebody would actually say? As I remember it, the answer is that somebody heard it from a guy, who must have heard it from another guy. It's old, from World War I or II or something like that. That's what's happening in a lot of these stores.

It's like the story about a family cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Someone asks Mom why they cut the ends off the ham. "Because my mom did it." So they ask her mom, who says the same thing about her own mother. Somewhere down the line, maybe a great-grandmother, someone finally explains: When we were growing up, we were so poor we didn't have a pan big enough for the ham, so we had to cut off the sides. You don't need to do that anymore. People still do it, without questioning, because the people before them did.

Then there's the kids' game where a whisper gets passed down the line. The first person says "I want to climb trees," the next says something close to it, and by the time it reaches the last kid, it's "I'm a tree." That game is about a message getting changed, so maybe it's not a perfect fit. My point is that this is getting passed down. There's a lineage.

Earl Nightingale talks about this in "The Strangest Secret," a recording from 1956 that I've heard: The opposite of courage isn't cowardice, it's conformity, people acting like everyone else without knowing why or where they're going. Dan Kennedy uses car salesmen as an example. A lot of them just look at what everyone else is doing: They hang around the water cooler and procrastinate on the calls they have to make, and that's why they don't make sales. If you want results other people aren't getting, he says, do the opposite of what they're doing. So many people are just followers, like the lemmings in that classic story, following each other off a cliff.

I know I got deeply philosophical about something as simple as somebody at a checkout saying they have to scan an ID. But to me it's serious. It's an indictment of human psychology: how much people follow instead of thinking independently, walking around in hypnotic trances and repeating what everybody else says. I happen to know something about hypnotic trances. I graduated in 2006 with a degree in clinical hypnosis from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute, which I consider one of the best schools of hypnosis in the world.

In the end, it didn't take a manager. Another associate put in her code and typed in the birth date she could read on the card hanging from my neck.