Effects of a National Information Campaign on Compliance With Age Restrictions for Alcohol Sales

Purpose: To investigate the effect of a national information campaign, introduced by the Dutch Food Retail Organization, named “Under 20? Show Your ID!,” on compliance with age restrictions on alcohol sales. The compliance level after the campaign was compared with a baseline compliance, that we calculated based on 458 preintervention compliance measurements. Methods: Data were collected using the method of mystery shopping. Three teams, each consisting of two 15-year-old mystery shoppers, conducted 105 alcohol purchase attempts in supermarkets in three regions in the Netherlands. Results: A compliance rate of 24.8% was found, which is a significant improvement compared with Dutch basement compliance rate from the past (14.9%), but is nominally still very low. Conclusions: This mass media intervention campaign failed to increase compliance to an acceptable level. Also the specific goal of the campaign (ask everybody under <20 years old for identification [ID]) failed because fewer than half of the 15-year-old mystery shoppers in the study were asked to show their ID when purchasing alcoholic beverages.