Teens Went Undercover as Old People Wearing Masks to Score Booze

It turns out that Generation Z is resourceful in more ways than one — and that they’ve adapted to pandemic life and the realities of mask-wearing with some devious strategies that are honestly just impressive. According to several reports, today’s teens are buying alcohol in a masterful way. Adjusting to the reality of a world where everyone must wear a mask inside, teens have been putting on masks and donning disguises to look like grandma and grandpa. That’s right: the teens are going full Jackass in order to buy a six-pack of Budweiser.

Adults caught on to this ingenious grift of wearing a face mask, and painting on wrinkles, and putting on baggy sweaters and old lady wigs after some teens posted videos of them doing the heist on TikTok. However — likely because of the outsized attention to the hilarious prank — many of those videos have since been deleted or the accounts that posted them have gone private, probably because what they did is technically a crime, even if it is a hilarious one.

The New York Post first broke the story a few days ago after one of the videos of a blonde teen drawing on wrinkles with makeup got 1.5 million views on TikTok. The teen enters a liquor store using a walker and wearing what can only be described as “old people clothes,” and walking out with a bag of alcohol. In comments, the teen, who lives in California, mentioned that the store owner had concerns about whether or not she’d even be able to carry the bottles out of the store by herself. (The video is now private.) There are a few of these littering TikTok right now — and while they’re funny, it might just make more sense for teens to don a mask and use their crappy fake ID. It’s not like store owners can see their full face anyway — and in many places, they can’t even ask them to take it off to confirm that they’re the same person.