Go Away, Kid!
An interesting trend has been shaping up in the malls of America over the past couple of years that has seen them adopting policies to limit the access of teens to stores. The Mall of America, the largest of the 46,990 malls in the U.S., has in place a version of the policy that it first instituted in 1996, and tightened just last fall. The mall's parental escort policy requires every teen fifteen and younger to be accompanied by a parent or guardian 21 years or older after six o'clock P.M. on Fridays and Saturdays. Security guards stop teens at entrances to demand ID and constantly check corridors and courtyards for unaccompanied teens.
The parental escort policy meets with much screaming of protest from teens wherever it is enacted, but it also sees a drop in shoplifting and a rise in sales, most interestingly in youth-oriented stores, as well as others. The exact reason for this is still up for speculation, but it may have to do with teens regarding malls as a place to be seen, a place to spend time in the evening, as much as they think of it as a place to spend money. It may also be because making your way through a crowd of loud, unruly teens to get to a store is not a pleasant prospect for many shoppers, especially when the expletives used by the adolescents are often enough to make a sailor blush, and you've got a toddler in a stroller or Grandma on your arm.
Even though teens are a demographic that spent $158 billion last year, they are also the demographic most responsible for incidents requiring police intervention at malls. While it is true that you should always be wary of painting every member of an age group with the same brush, it is also true that incidents requiring police intervention have declined markedly at every mall with an adult accompaniment policy. Just as evident is the truth that families return to shop at malls they had begun to avoid when they were "taken over" by a teen presence in the evenings.
At the Mall of America, for instance, there were 300 incidents involving teens under sixteen that required either the issue of trespassing citations or the police being called. The year after the policy was put in place, there were only two incidents, according to Maureen Bausch, the mall's vice president of business development. That same mall also had approximately 10,000 teens under sixteen on any given Friday or Saturday night before the policy. Now Bausch says the weekend evenings see even more shoppers there opening their wallets and buying.
Teenage Research Unlimited says that 68% of 12- to 19-year-olds spend an average of three hours at the mall each week. What value do they really derive from those hours? Maybe the curfew policy could be a blessing in disguise. It could perhaps become a part of more parents getting more directly involved in their kids' lives. If fewer families used the malls as adolescent daycare centres and began spending a little more time together, it might not be a bad thing.
The parental escort policy meets with much screaming of protest from teens wherever it is enacted, but it also sees a drop in shoplifting and a rise in sales, most interestingly in youth-oriented stores, as well as others. The exact reason for this is still up for speculation, but it may have to do with teens regarding malls as a place to be seen, a place to spend time in the evening, as much as they think of it as a place to spend money. It may also be because making your way through a crowd of loud, unruly teens to get to a store is not a pleasant prospect for many shoppers, especially when the expletives used by the adolescents are often enough to make a sailor blush, and you've got a toddler in a stroller or Grandma on your arm.
Even though teens are a demographic that spent $158 billion last year, they are also the demographic most responsible for incidents requiring police intervention at malls. While it is true that you should always be wary of painting every member of an age group with the same brush, it is also true that incidents requiring police intervention have declined markedly at every mall with an adult accompaniment policy. Just as evident is the truth that families return to shop at malls they had begun to avoid when they were "taken over" by a teen presence in the evenings.
At the Mall of America, for instance, there were 300 incidents involving teens under sixteen that required either the issue of trespassing citations or the police being called. The year after the policy was put in place, there were only two incidents, according to Maureen Bausch, the mall's vice president of business development. That same mall also had approximately 10,000 teens under sixteen on any given Friday or Saturday night before the policy. Now Bausch says the weekend evenings see even more shoppers there opening their wallets and buying.
Teenage Research Unlimited says that 68% of 12- to 19-year-olds spend an average of three hours at the mall each week. What value do they really derive from those hours? Maybe the curfew policy could be a blessing in disguise. It could perhaps become a part of more parents getting more directly involved in their kids' lives. If fewer families used the malls as adolescent daycare centres and began spending a little more time together, it might not be a bad thing.
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