Of Mall Rats and Boycotts

I wanted to wait until I could talk for a while with Kevin, my 13-year old, before weighing in on the Clearview Mall controversy. He and his friends are the direct targets of the mall's ire.

For those of you who didn't know this, we live pretty much directly across Veterans from Clearview Mall, three blocks up towards the lake. Kev's friends will occasionally stop by to drag him along to go to Game Trader, a used game-system software place. Once upon a time, when I was going to UNO in the late 1970s, I worked in the men's department of the Maison Blanche there (located where Target is now). Clearview Mall and I are old friends.

I used to be a high school teacher, and a high school soccer referee, so I don't fear teenagers. More importantly, they don't bother me. When I was teaching, I worked nights at the Radio Shack in Lakeside. We used to have hacker kids in and out of the store from 4pm until closing time most nights, and almost all the day on Saturdays. It wasn't a big deal, but these were geek kids. The true mall rats hang out in the food court. From a social standpoint, some of these kids are vain, petty, and disgusting, but that's common of teens. They're not all that annoying to people outside their peer groups.

Clearview Mall has evolved over time. In the 1970s, the big stores were Maison Blanche, Sears, and Gus Mayer (which was where the Bed, Bath and Beyond is now). There were hardly any food places, the K&B soda fountain (the last of its kind in the metro area), A&G Cafeteria (more-or-less where the movie theater is now), and a little snack bar in Sears. When Dillard's closed the MB store and Target came in, the dynamic of the mall completely changed. Now, the mall is more like an oversized strip mall, where people come for a specific purpose, go to Target, go out to eat, go to the show, go to Sears. That you can move through the interior of the mall is convenient but secondary to most shoppers.

This is where the mall and the store owners (other than the major anchors) come into conflict with the kids. The perception is that, if the place is teeming with packs of marauding adolescents, people will drive up to Target or Sears or BB&B, and bypass the Hallmark, candy shop, mobile phone store, etc., inside. Early teens (under sixteen) don't spend money like older teens and twenty-somethings, which is why they're the targets of the weekend ban--nobody sixteen and under after 4pm on Saturdays and Sundays without an escort who has to be over 21.

Naturally, the kids are pissed, and have organized a boycott. One teen even set up a MySpace page to support the mall's position. He's 18, of course, and most likely doesn't have much use for 13-year olds.

Is kicking teens out of the mall on Friday and Saturday nights a huge thing in the Grand Scheme of Things? No, not really. Apart from the kids themselves, the people most inconvenienced are the parents who willingly drop-kick the kids to the mall on weekends so they can get away from them for a while. It shouldn't take much imagination to come up with something to keep them busy on weekends, assuming they're really not simply using the mall as free babysitting in the first place.

And that's really the bottom-line issue: free babysitting. If adult shoppers want Friday and Saturday nights to be "adult swim" at the mall, they need to be imaginative. They need to get JPRD involved and come up with some less-structured activities at the playgrounds. Get the church parishes to sponsor some weekend activities.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sheriff Normand and the parents of Metairie should be asking themselves where these kids are going to go if they're denied entrance to the mall. If Clearview Mall doesn't want the younger teens, fine, that's their right (and they're following a national trend). The younger teens don't spend money like their older brothers and sisters, anyway. Where the kids end up on Friday night isn't the mall's problem, but it should be something others consider.

Personally, my kiddo isn't all that upset about the closure. He's a band kid, so he spends a lot of Friday nights at football and basketball games. We often do things as a family on Saturday nights, so that about covers the ban times. His friends are part of the boycott. Other than the game store, Game Trader, and the food court, however, I don't see where they're going to have a big impact on the mall stores or management.