Liquor store owner Bob Zenner got burned once selling booze to a minor and said he now has a system to keep it from happening again.
Zenner, owner of Terry’s Liquor Store in Alamosa, installed two biometric fingerprint identification systems this month. He said the system of using high-tech scanners and fingerprints for age verification in liquor sales is a first.
“We are able to eliminate … minors trying to fool us with fake IDs,” Zenner said.
One national privacy group questions the approach, but two other members of the San Luis Valley Alcohol Retailers Alliance, a group of 21 independent liquor stores and bars, also have adopted the technology.
Andrew Vigil, manager of All Stars Sports Grill in Alamosa, said his bar plans to order at least one of the $3,000 scanners.
“We liked it,” Vigil said.
He said that his bar catches about three fake IDs a week and that the fingerprint system would help patrons enter the bar’s companion club, The Zone, more quickly.
Here’s how the system works:
Customers register with a store clerk by showing a driver’s license or picture identification, which is thoroughly inspected to ensure authenticity, and having their fingerprint scanned and converted into a partial replica and entered into a database.
Then, instead of flashing a picture ID for each purchase, the customer places a fingertip on an electronic scanner next to the cash register. The scanner identifies the fingerprint and informs the store clerk of the customer’s date of birth, driver’s license number and expiration date.
The system allows store employees to quickly determine if the person is of age to buy alcohol. So far, Zenner has registered 1,300 people – a process that takes less than one minute per person.
“I was initially taken back with the Big Brother syndrome of it,” said Al Greer, 53, who is registered in the system. “But I found that it’s easy to use and streamlines a process that can be a hassle.”
Alamosa police also had positive words.
“If all the liquor stores run their customers through this system, we won’t have liquor stores selling to underage people,” Police Chief Ron Lindsey said.
Other biometric recognition systems include facial recognition, voice verification and eye scans for credit card fraud protection and airport, banking and border security.
Not everybody is a fan.
Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group dedicated to protecting individual rights, said fingerprint ID technology is “flaky.”
He said the system is likely to produce incorrect information at times. Other concerns include people creating fraudulent fingerprints with specialized gels and business owners tracking and selling customer information to marketers.
“Sometimes technology is used as a magic wand, but right now the technology isn’t good enough for this,” O’Brien said. “People put too much trust in these systems, and if they are wrong, there are no other checks and balances.”
Zenner said that the system is “very accurate” and that minors are less likely to make fake fingerprints than fake IDs.
He said the scanner saves a 21-point template of each fingerprint and discards the actual print, helping to ensure confidentiality: “We are not allowing the customer information to go anywhere.”
Zenner, a former project manager for Hewlett-Packard in Colorado, helped hatch the idea last year after police busted his store for selling alcohol to a minor. His store was shut down for three days in December, costing him roughly $34,000 in sales.
He contacted Blanca Peak Technologies, a new security company 20 miles east of Alamosa, which scoured the Internet and found Food Service Systems, a Pennsylvania company that sells fingerprint ID systems.
Blanca Peak and Food Service Systems modified the technology for use in liquor stores and bars, said Kelly Gerards, Blanca Peak’s owner.
The system requires shop owners to have a dedicated high-speed Internet connection to hook into a remote server in an office building in Alamosa.
Eventually, all the liquor stores in the area that use the technology could be connected, allowing customers to shop from one store to the next with only the swipe of a finger, Gerards said.
Staff writer Will Shanley can be reached at 303-820-1473 or wshanley@denverpost.com.
