CICC launches ID Please: Selling Alcohol Beverages Responsibly training program
The Convenience Industry Council of Canada (CICC) is helping Ontario retailers seeking to sell beverage alcohol by offering a online comprehensive training program.
ID Please: Selling Alcohol Beverages Responsibly (SABR) has received approval from the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) for retail licensees and employees involved in the sale, service, and delivery of liquor, or taking orders for the sale of liquor, at a licensed convenience store, grocery store, or offsite winery retail store.
The course, which costs for CICC retail members $10 per employee (non-member fee $19), focuses on selling rather than serving alcohol, ensuring that retail employees are fully prepared for the September 5th launch of retail beverage alcohol sales in convenience stores across Ontario.
READ: Convenience stores quickly signing up to sell beverage alcohol in Ontario
Mike Hammoud, vice-president, Atlantic Canada at CICC, led the development and launch of ID Please: SABR. He says the program—which only takes some 40 minutes to one hour to complete online—was designed with retailers in mind, as was CICC’s other ID Please training programs for selling tobacco and vaping products.
“It is a standardized program that our retailers can take when it comes to selling an age-restricted product,” he adds. “We wanted to show the government that we are a responsible community of retailers [for selling such products] and we wanted to make it affordable for a retailer’s staff to get the needed training. Like those offerings, you will get a certificate that will show that you as a retailer have done your due diligence and allows for inspectors to see that the staff has been properly trained.”
Having the program officially endorsed by the AGCO also ensures the course materials and training cover all the regulations that AGCO requires retailers to meet to sell beverage alcohol in Ontario.
“If you are a convenience store, you have got to be under 4,000 sq. ft., you've got to have closed walls. And you can't be in an open space,” Hammoud says. “So there's a lot of information that will guide you through what you need to do to, first of all from how to qualify to get a license to sell the product, then all of the training aspects for employees and what they need to know when it comes to a refusing the sale to someone that's underage or refusing the sale to someone that seems intoxicated, for example.”
More information about the new ID Please: SABR can be found at http://conveniencetraining.com/.
