Hacker News Reader

Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts.

Google "malls that ban teenagers" and you will find a lot of articles. I have been to a few places that have signs "Anyone under 18 must be chaperoned by an adult."

View on HN

>When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts.

It's so wild looking back at those times. My friends and I would take the bus to the mall, which took (what felt like) forever. And we'd hang out there, browse stores, etc. for HOURS. Even though none of us had any money to spend. Sometimes we'd get a fountain soda at the food court for $.50. it's amazing we'd spend so much time at stores when we had no money.

Usually that's the result of an incident with premeditated mayhem from an unsupervised gathering.

Maybe there's some rare incident, maybe they're just annoyed the teens don't spend enough per hour. It doesn't really matter. Teens aren't some special danger, and it's bad when places want to give off the impression of being a nice public place but fail to be one in significant ways.

It doesn’t matter to a non stakeholder like you. For the business owners, it clearly matters.

What they think has very little relevance to the problem of teens having nowhere to go.

And in general the US has been really lacking in third places.

The late 80's and early 90's was peak mayhem but kids still hung out unsupervised at the mall.

Sure. But the end result is still teenagers losing a place to go.

its usually from shoplifting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com