What Would You Do if Approached by a Minor in Front of a Liquor Store?

Feb. 18, 2011 — -- It's something that more than half of 12- to 20-year-olds participate in every year -- underage drinking.

Fifty-three percent of all people age 12 to 20 have engaged in underage drinking at some point in their lives, according to a study by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The 2008 study also found that 650,000 of the underage drinkers were provided alcohol by their parents.

But what about the adults who say no to teens?

"What Would You Do?" wondered: If a minor approached you in front of a store to buy them alcohol, how would you respond? Would you say no? Would you alert the police? The store owner? Or would you say yes?

"What Would You Do?" hired three male actors, all over the age of 21, to play 18-year-olds asking adults if they would be willing to buy them beer. Our location: Station Liquors in Rutherford, N.J., rigged with our hidden cameras to see how people would respond to our actors' pleas.

When we started the day, we positioned our three young actors on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store.

The very first person the "teens" approached stopped and listened to their request for beer.

"How old are you?" she asked.

After the actor responded that he was 18, the woman asked what he wanted -- and she seemed amenable to his request, with a condition.

She told the group that they needed to be out of eyesight of the store owner.

"Are you parked in the parking lot? 'Cause you can't hang out here and I give that to you. I'm not going to do it right in front of this store. He'll have me arrested," she said.

After the money changed hands, she headed straight to the counter, only to meet us.

"Well, I told them I didn't want to do it because it was illegal. But, when I was 18 it was legal," she told "What Would You Do?"

"But, I'm doing the wrong thing," she added. "I have kids and if that happened I would be angry."

In that case, the woman's sympathy for our actors seemed to have been fueled by history. In 1984, the federal government successfully pressured states to raise the drinking age to 21. Before that, in more than two dozen states -- including New Jersey, where our scenario was based -- people between the ages of 18 and 20 were allowed to drink legally, meaning that some of the people who passed by our actors were drinking legally by the time they were 18.

Would that fact continue to help our "minors"?