Hasn't this been going on for a few years now?

As a teenager I would have cried if they threw me out of the mall. Now as an adult I see the point. My mall in VA had a "only 3 to a group" rule which I thought was pretty good.

I am all for it. Granted I'm not a teen anymore by 2 years. But I see stupid shit all the time when I do visit the mall.

The large mall downtown started a "No one under 18 after 6 pm" cause of gang fights...Seriously. I live in a white trash wonderland, and these people act like they are bloods and crips.

If you wanna act like a little shit, then do it somewhere else.

Though I do think that no one after 2:30 pm is a little extreme. School lets out at 3, so basicly they are saying that you can come to the mall, during school hours, but if you get caught then you are truant.

Good luck getting teenage slaves for mall jobs now

I'm all for it. Malls are private property, and if they don't want non-shoppers taking up space, thats their option. Its understandable that they wouldn't want people just taking up space and using mall resources without spending any money. Let the kids go hang out at the park or some other public place.

Well, that's aweful. Now where are Republican pols going to find "dating" material?

When I worked downtown, I often spent my lunch hour at Tower City. Every time I was there I couldn't help but notice the throngs of young high-schoolers there, being loud and causing trouble, when they should be in school.

@blondegrlz:
The Charleston Town Center here in Charleston, WV has signs posted saying something like "unaccompanied juveniles in groups of 4 or more will be disbursed" but I don't think it is strictly enforced unless the kids are being loud or otherwise causing a problem. This seems reasonable to me.

I'm not sure what to think of this.

On the one hand I'm not a teenager anymore, by a long shot, and I hate having to wade through bondage pants and spiked hair outside of Hot Topic, or get bumped into with errant bowls of ColdStone because someone wasn't watching where they were going. Sort of the Get Off My Lawn mentality.

On the other hand, where are these kids supposed to go that they won't get into trouble? In my area there aren't many public parks that aren't just big swaths of grass with a few trees off in the corner. woo. hoo. fun times. There are hardly any skate parks that teenagers can get to without driving, and all the arcades are closed as well.

We push our kids out of the house because we don't want them becoming couch potatoes, but they aren't allowed to do anything or go anywhere out in the real world. No wonder they act out all the time and get into trouble. If I felt so much like a pinball I'd do the same stuff.

How about sitting the same people down who impose curfews like this and make them come up with a list of 10 places that the displaced teenagers can go or things they can do, then put up signs in the mall to lure them away. It's win win. The busybody meddling NIMBY fucks get rid of the teens but they have to work for it, the kids get places to go, and everyone's happy.

I'm in my mid twenties and still get hassled at Tower City. The center piece of the mall is a long elaborate marble fountain that was designed for people to sit around. Sit on or near it and expect to be shooed along like a human pigeon.

I can understand why they want to keep the kids out, but seriously, our cities economy is in shambles and they need every tax dollar they can get.

@DeeJayQueue:
The simple fact that they have nowhere else to go is not a terribly persuasive argument in favor of the malls allowing the kids to hang out there. I hate those arguments. It's not the malls fault, nor their problem that the kids have nowhere else to go.

This is pretty outrageous in my opinion (and yes, I am older than 20). Especially in the suburban landscape there aren't many places for kids to go, especially for the cases where kids have real reasons to want to stay out of the house. I'm sure a better solution can be found that will assuage the egos of middle-aged shoppers and give teenagers somewhere to go/something to do. Granted they can be a bit noisy and stupid, but it comes with the territory.

It is better for the malls business to do this unfortunately. Teen's spend little money in the mall and it is true that the malls shoppers do not want to have to put up with them or feel threatened by them. Malls don't even have arcades anymore because the arcades supposedly bring the unwanted crowds, and if there are arcades where you live most of them you cannot get into alone unless you are over 18 or over 21 eliminating that choice. Most malls here have similar rules and enforce them with guarded entrances.

I am not a teen anymore but I also see the teen's side of the story. There is no where for a teen to go anymore, so they take to the streets which means vandalism and more loitering. If the mall wants this policy they should contribute money or something to a safe place for teens to go to have fun, not every teen is bad and some are just looking for entertainment. We cannot just displace teens and expect them to go away, we need to also provide a safe place where they can have fun, there are 2 sides to this story.

@Thaddeus: If you have made a purchase in the mall you are entitled to be there for as long as you want for up to 24 hours, as you are a legitimate customer of the mall, at least thats the way it works over here.

I never hung out at the mall when I was a teenager. I never could stand the mall. Its to be avoided at all costs.
I also never spent my time hanging out at "the rickety barn, the derelict mine shaft, and the defunct mill." There are places kids can hang out at other than the mall you know. We aren't all either alcoholic druggies, or teenybopper mallrats.

Let's see here. When I was a teenager after school I did the following in any given day: 1) stay in school for after school activities (test preparation, tutoring, clubs, etc) 2) Go over a friends house for a bit (play games, do homework, etc) 3) Hmm I don't know...go home? There were always shores, homework, projects and get this...I had other neighbor kids to hang around with in my block. I don't know where teenagers are getting all this free time to just hang around in the mall. When I was young I barely got enough time to just watch some tv at night. Regardless, Malls are not babysitters. Just like libraries now have rules that you can't just go and leave your kids there for 5 hours. Damn I sound old...

@SaraAB87:

Why should the mall contribute money for teen activities? Did the mall play a part in having the kids? The job falls to the parents or to the teens themselves.

The mall is private property. They owe the community taxes, a relatively safe place to shop, and that's about it. They are not in the business of entertaining teenagers. Frankly, when I go to the mall and have to run the gauntlet of smoking, cursing, screaming teenagers just to get inside, and have to navigate around huge groups of cursing kids while I have my own little one just to get to the shoe store, it makes me want to avoid the mall at all costs.

You'll notice that a lot of new shopping centers don't have "insides" like the malls of old. No inside, no place to hang out, no problem.

I'm not unsympathetic, but I want a safe place to shop. The mall wants me to have a safe place to shop, too, or I don't go there & they go dark.

A mall is not a public space, if you consider it that then democracy is dead.

Malls have replaced the public space, where you have constitutional rights and now your only right is to spend your money like a little whore.

I was a teenager. Once. A long time ago.

I was bad. Evil. Abusive.

My HS Senior Class literally took over the Pizza Inn in my town 'cause we had "nowhere" to go. Male Cow Patties, we had places to go, it was just that it was easier to go necking in the backseat of the car at Pizza Inn than it was to go necking in the pew at the 1st Baptist Church with the Preacher's daughter.

We chose the easy way, and so are today's teens.

Should the malls bannish the teens?

From a merchant's perspective I say HELL YES.

What I did was wrong, and what today's teens are doing is wrong as well. When we took over the Pizza Inn on Friday and Saturday Nights we were damaging the stores business. Familys with young children did not want to visit because of the roudy teens. The 15 year olds didnt want to take their dates there because of the older teens. The working guys from the mill didn't want to go there after work for a brew and a slice because of the all of the teens. The college dudes didn't want to go there because of the "younger" crowd. And us seniors didn't have much more than a pot to piss in, so we split a large pizza between 10 people and bring our own soda's because we were so cheap. How can any business stay open when the real paying customers are driven away?

I recently HAD to go to CC, BB and OD on a Friday night. Needless to say the 3 stores are in megashopping complex. What a firetrucking nightmare. Even OD, like paper and pens is a teenager's wet dream, was filled with space wasting teenagers. CC was such a zoo. The clerk that waiting on me, himself a pimply faced 20 yearold, even remarked that I was the first paying customer that he had waited upon in over 2 hours. Only BB was semi teen-free and that was only because the squad car parked in front of the store with lights flashing and 3 teens against the side of the car was discouraging more teens from entering the store. {The teens had gotten into a fight and broke a display stand... real smart}

I really hope my local mall boycotts teens

two-fucking-thirty? My god, this would have seriously damaged what bare social life I had in high school on friday nights.

I have a bunch of ranty things in my head, including how malls are a blight and they deserve to have herds of adolescents released upon them, but I'll just comment that I remember when I was a teenager, and how much it did for my respect for authority when I had to deal with a lot of bullshit because of groundless assumptions about my friends and myself. I can still grind my teeth a little when I remember getting tossed out of the mall, or having to dump out my purse to prove I hadn't stolen anything.

So because security can't handle teens, they want to get rid of them. Simple solution. Give a written warning to those teens that are disruptive, and if they come back and are disruptive again, call the police and have a trespass citation given to them.

Why punish the good teens that enjoy the mall and behave like they should?

I don't see the 'cool' factor of hanging out at a mall, but window shopping is always a fun and free activity. No teens after 2:30pm w/o an adult is pretty harsh, but I don't know how bad the loitering problem is in Cleveland.

Ultimately it's their private property so they can do what they want.

So if teens can't hang out in the mall, where am I supposed to pick up hot teen girls for some steamy action?

@BigNutty: Punishing all teenagers for their collective actions is a great and glorious tradition. We've done it since I was a teenager thirty years ago and we do it still today, and with any luck my kids teenagers will be equally group-persecuted. Don't rock the boat, pal.

Parents - MALLS ARE NOT BABYSITTERS.

Malls are not there to babysit your brat hanging out until you come home or decided to pay attention to your brat.

Malls are there for business and to make money. They want people who will show up and buy stuff. Malls don't want bozo teens slack'n the place up.

Sounds like a bad idea -- teenagers are, after all, the group with the largest amount of discretionary income, and probably one of the biggest sources of income for the stores IN the mall.

@morganlh85: When the teenagers come from a low-income and high-crime demographic, no I don't think so. The problem is that these roving gangs of teenagers often commit crimes or otherwise make people less likely to want to come, shop, and spend their money.

I've seen the rise and fall of malls as urban decay and its associated demographic shift sets in on a neighborhood. Often times, this is a sort of last-ditch effort to keep the malls viable from the hoodlums that just loiter around and cause problems.

@BigNutty: Basically for the same reason that the entire policy is being protested in the linked article: certain factions are complaining that the policy is racist. If you only go after disruptive teams, eventually someone is going to accuse you of singling certain ones out. So you set a blanket policy and eliminate some of that risk.

As for the "where are teens supposed to go" question: The issue here is not where can kids go to hang out together. The issue is why can't (some, not all) kids seem to congregate these days without some form of violence, either verbal or physical, becoming a factor? I really don't believe these policies are put in place because quiet groups of teenagers were wandering the mall minding their own business but not spending cash (if that was the case I'd never be allowed in). They are put in place because of obnoxious, foul-mouthed, defiant asshats who think this behavior marks them as cool and adult. So if an alternate place was provided for them, they'd f*** that place up too. Until the behavior changes, they can stay the hell home.

A lot of attempts at constructing teen curfew laws in public places have, over the past years, failed court tests when appealed.
Just funneling kids out of a mall will most likely only transfer their negative behavior to the streets where other merchants will take the hits.

"It's best they stick to the rickety barn, the derelict mine shaft, and the defunct mill."

Survival of the fittest baby! I'm all for it!

Where do I fall? I'm 19, so I'm both a teenager and an adult, also 18 year olds are both.

Isn't that discrimination based on age? Lawsuit, anybody?

Just a suggestion : give teens' parents a fine, every time he or she disrupts ''peace'' at the mall.

Once the teen gets grounded couple of times, his behavior should be more acceptable in public.

@chouchou: Its rather common for cities to have curfews for minors.

I've been to this mall and yeah, they have a problem not with groups of teens but with herds and flocks of teens. And the stores there are like Brooks Brothers.

@chouchou: Age discrimination is typically a labor issue, and the laws are generally written and/or enforced with a minimum age of 40.

As for fines, it bears repeating that the mall isn't a babysitter.

Teens can't go to the mall!?!?! Oh no what shall they do?!

STUDY TO GET INTO A GOOD SCHOOL.

What is HAPPENING to this country?! Values have shifted from education to consumerism and it's just frightening.

@Zombietime: The internet, just like all the other creepy old men!

simple solution: do nothing, take it in the neck (more polite than saying up the arse)

more complicated solution: exercise your "constitutional rights" and get arrested. Organize a massive sit in. Get every teenager and young adult from all 126 (made up number) area high schools and junior highs to congregate with a coordinated attack at 4pm or some such time. (after all schools have let out to cause maximum congregation) Then refuse to leave, most sheep won't do it, but plenty of people would show up to see if it was going to go off, etc, adding to the number of teens around. Of course that's just me, having helped execute my best friend in H.S., Shaun Brown's idea of having a walk-out.

Got many of the changes that were called for in the underground newspaper (such as; tardy policy changed from 3 per year to 3 per semester [the in school suspension was moved to the auditorium and the absence list, which also listed ISS students grew to 3 pages because it made no difference; tardy to class, or tardy to school 3 X= suspension], and putting stall doors in the boys' restrooms [a pretty big thing if you think about it]). Even though the administration said "walking out won't change anything" in the local paper.

I got 10 days out of school suspension for circulating the "underground newspaper" (but to be fair, it was typed on school equipment, and computer lab paper). The funniest thing was that my first day back from suspension would've been Good Friday, all those days off plus weekends plus Easter Vacation amounted to about a month off of school. My parents supported me all the way through it (without being snotty 'my kid can do no wrong' types, and especially catching onto the administration's lies), and I got my name in the paper a couple times. I also got to make up ALL my class and homework by appealing to the school board due to another thing I had pointed out in the underground newspaper (that the sports members were allowed to make up work when they were suspended out of school, but everyone was supposed to fail the work they missed).

Sorry about the rant there.

These kids are your future caretakers. Most of them aren't that bad, sure they digitally "steal" music and movies and such (even all those they already own!), but you do too. Get to know them, teach them about the evils of credit cards or something. Okay, after-school special over.

whoops, and I understand that "constitutional rights" don't apply in the mall which is "private property"

OK, it's like this. An individual does something wrong. Another individual does it too. Time goes by and some other individuals do it. The numbnuts think, "Oh, what could be causing this?" They look for something in commmon. "Whoa, look, most of them are between the ages of 13 and 18, except for the ones who aren't." "Perfect, we can do stuff to that age group we can't do to other age groups."

Because, naturally, all teenagers steal, fight, and ruin things. And all over-18s don't. Right?

Whatever. Going to have coffee now. Glad I don't bother with malls anymore.

@DallasDMD: How commone is rather common? Are there any major American cities that do this?

@louisb3: From the Houston Chronicle back in May, when they last tightened the (existing) rules:

Nights got a little shorter for most teenagers following changes to the city's curfew passed Wednesday.
Children under 17 must be off the streets by 11 p.m. on weeknights instead of the previous midnight rule, under revisions to the curfew ordinance approved by the City Council. It takes effect immediately.
"On school nights, you should be at home asleep and doing your schoolwork," said Mayor Bill White. "Unless you're working or working on some sort of school project, you don't need to be running around on the streets after 11 o'clock."
The ordinance includes existing exceptions for teenagers who are accompanied by a parent, traveling to work, participating in events sponsored by a school, government, church group or sports organization, or involved in an emergency.
All others now are prohibited from being on the streets after 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends, including during summer months when school is not in session.
The previous curfew had been in place since 1991 and applied to children under 18, setting the deadline at midnight every night.
The midnight curfew still stands on Friday and Saturday nights, as well as on the eve of holidays.

Several parents said they support the new rules, though most said they preferred the law also apply to 17-year-olds.

"I think it's awesome that they're getting strict on these kids," said Jody Wilding, a Meyerland resident who has a 16-year-old son. "They have no business being out at 11 o'clock on a school night, I don't care how old they are."
The city's curfew ordinance includes daytime restrictions when school is in session, requiring children under 17 to be off the streets from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. The council made no changes to that rule.

So, yeah, BIG cities.

I think twice about visiting the mall sometimes because I know I will have to deal with hundreds of annoying junior high schooolers, HOWEVER, I must say that there really isn't anything better to do in the suburbs.

Back in the day (10 years or so ago) I HATED going to mall because of all the throngs of teens just hanging out in large groups. And when they'd walk 3 or 4 people abreast they often blocked the walkways. I dreaded going to the malls because of this. Too bad they didnt start banning teens back then.

But nowadays most of the malls have died out & I really dont see much of a reason for me to go to the ones that are still open.

I am a legitimate paying shopper and I can say without a doubt that packs of teenagers turn me away from the mall.

As to those who say security should deal with the unruly teens and leave the well mannered ones alone: This is not so easy these days. Any enforcement can be interpreted as racisim, ageism or a variety of other "isms". Much easier to enact an "everyone" loses policy.

The mall I frequent is always full of teenagers but the teenagers are in 10 deep lines to the register, pouring out of Abercrombie, Hollister, American Eagle, and Sephora.

I imagine the curfews are brought up and/or approved by the merchants, who would know whether banning teenagers is going to help or harm their business.

Where I live now and the last place I lived are pretty similar in size, racial makeup, poverty, violence, gangs, etc. Where I live now actually has more teen violence problems.

But the LAST place I lived they had curfews and "large herds forbidden" rules for teenagers at the mall and it seemed necessary, because it was awful. Even with the rules in place, you routinely felt threatened. Or actually got threatened.

Where I live now, basically same demographic, lots of teens at the mall ...... no problems. Sure, they're boisterous and periodically stupid, but that's the worst of it, and they're mostly more or less polite.

I'd be really curious to know what accounts for the difference in mall behavior!

I thought the only point to the mall was for teens to hang out somewhere. I'm 23 and never go to the mall because I can't think of anything more painful to do, based on the huge crowds and bland stores.

Sounds like a great idea! Teenagers who don't hangout in malls grow up to be adults that don't hang out in malls.

Hell, when I was a teenager we hung out in graveyards and gravel pits - the malls wouldn't let us bring cases of Piels in.