Unaccompanied teens banned from Black Friday!

[packers]

I love that MOA does this. We try to go on a Friday or Saturday evening just to avoid the mall rats.

It is a great place to get out of the house and walk around at in the middle of winter.

Isn't a mall rat just someone who's just walking around not really doing anything? Yes many teenagers will do that but there's nothing wrong with it as long as they're not doing anything wrong. Also many just want to shop like the rest of us especially at this time of year they have loved ones they want to get presents for too. It's age discrimination, their money is just as good as ours and we shouldn't punish all of them because of the bad ones. We don't punish all adults because of the bad ones. How is a teenager suppose to turn into a respectable young adult if we spend all their teen years treating them like dirt.

Have you been to MOA on a Saturday?? The place is packed and the groups of teens can get to be 20-30 people. They seriously will block the halls and descend on stores but never buy anything. I'm not saying it is all teens, just the kind that do things like this. I prefer to go there when they are not there. My personal opinion. Now if only they would ban strollers too. I hate it when those things hit me in the legs.

[Kaelha]

I agree with Packers here. The kids congregating in the MOA are not hardworking kids looking to buy dear grandmother a new knitting bag. These kids run in large groups that disrupt the businesses and people around them.

No one is treating them like dirt by asking them to be accompanied by an adult. The MOA is protecting the hardworking public that shop there. The teens are being ask to show respect and responsibility and it seems like the only way to secure that is to have them accompanied by a responsible adult. If you want respect, you need to earn respect. Had large groups (upwards of 200 in one case) of teens not rioted on several occasions, this wouldn't be an issue.

Pretty sure if you'd had your shopping bag ripped out of your hand , a fist fight break out in front of you, or a chair thrown in your direction, you might feel differently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZXYjlaP610 At about 1:45 it gets really interesting.

[kowen]

I work in a mall, and I can tell you that most of the groups of teens that I see don't have one shopping bag between them. Most are not there to shop. They are there to hang out. I work in a small store, and if I get a huge group of teens, I can't keep an eye on all of them. And they know it. It runs other shoppers out of the mall because most of them run up and down the halls, scream their heads off and act like morons. I'm not saying that all groups are bad, and therefore its unfortunate that the bad apples ruin the whole bunch.

[GinaBeana87]

This was my biggest pet peeve this year. They were put in hoarded just standing around making the mall way more crowded than it needed to be. So annoying.....

[BF364]

A friend of mine who used to work at Bath & Body Works (she quit B&BW when she got a better offer i.e. more hours at a higher hourly rate at a non-chain retail store) said that the big reason why B&BW sales people are so in your face friendly is to deter shoplifters, many of whom unfortunately are teens. I told her to tell corporate that if they stopped manufacturing only fragrances that young people lliked and stopped discontinuing the fragrances older adults like some of us old timers would still be in their store more often spending more money and seeing that while we were there the teens in store were actually shopping and not there to cause problems

[teknoge3k]

A friend of mine who used to work at Bath & Body Works (she quit B&BW when she got a better offer i.e. more hours at a higher hourly rate at a non-chain retail store) said that the big reason why B&BW sales people are so in your face friendly is to deter shoplifters, many of whom unfortunately are teens. I told her to tell corporate that if they stopped manufacturing only fragrances that young people lliked and stopped discontinuing the fragrances older adults like some of us old timers would still be in their store more often spending more money and seeing that while we were there the teens in store were actually shopping and not there to cause problems

I am in my 30s and my wife in her 20s. We both like the smell of things in B&BW, as does my mother in-law which is in her 50s. I think that B&BW appeals to the younger crowds, leaving the older crowds to shop places like Macy's, JCPenney, Belk, etc.

[BF364]

@teknoge3k I'm in my mid 40s and B&BW started discontinuing my favorites when I was in my mid 30s. So your wife has time to enjoy shopping there for now. But that store is very much about drawing in a younger shopper now. They think that if they win a young customer they will have her (or him) for a long time but to them a long time means 'until they look like they might be too old for us'. When you don't look young enough, they will discontinue your favorites

The problem for B&BW is it's the older customers who have more money to spend so by pissing me off means they don't get me coming in every month to spend $50 (or more) each time I visit (as I used to do). Instead I only go to the 2x a year Big Sale (January and then again in June) and buy what I like that they are discontinuing (which is less and less all the time). If B&BW gets $100 a year from me now any more that's a really good year for them (and these days that means I only bought 3 bottles of Bigelow Lemon cologne, retail is $34.50 on it, instead of the big bags and bags of stuff I used to buy). $80 on hand soap would have been a tiny buy for me back in the day as I bought my friends' favorites as gifts (my friends are mostly close to my age or older and have had the 'discontinuations' happen to them too so there's even less reason for me to go to B&BW).

But one of the things my friend the former B&BW employee does not miss is having to home in on its young customers to be 'friendly' when really it was about intimidating them into not stealing anything on her shift. That's a sad commentary on what B&BW thinks of the customers it has left. Not all young people are up to no good in malls just as older people are not necessarily bad customers. But B&BW corporate doesn't see us that way. So I'm less interested in shopping B&BW.

[CrazyTrain]

That is so true... I don't like many... most of the new scents. I go for hand sanitizer and the holiday scents. Don't spend nearly as much there as I used to. I am in my mid-30s!