Retailers are banning unaccompanied minors. It’s bad for business and sends a terrible message to teens

The other day, my 15-year-old daughter and her friend were smelling candles in the local grocery store just two blocks from our home. I frequently send my daughter, and my younger son, 10, to grab a few items there when I’m busy—especially in the summer when no one gripes about the walk. But on this particular day, an employee approached the girls and asked them to leave the store immediately. “Why?” they responded in unison, taken aback.

The answer: Because they didn’t have a parent or guardian with them.

Annoyed, but not entirely shocked, I popped by and spoke to a manager (in the least Karen-like fashion I could muster). I was told that the grocery store does not have a no kids or teens policy, and that the employee had been mistaken. I was relieved, yet at the same time, I wouldn’t have been stunned to learn about a newly implemented policy banning teens. My rules-following first born has grown used to being kicked out of businesses. In the past year, she’s been asked to leave a department store, our local mall, and other chains, not for loitering, being loud, or misbehaving in any way, but simply because she wasn’t with an adult.

She’s not alone—it’s happening to teens everywhere.

Research on just how many malls and shopping centers across the U.S. have banned teens is lacking, but according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, per the Los Angeles Times, at least 105 out of the 1,222 U.S. malls have policies that ban or restrict teens during certain hours.

The nowhere-to-go generation

The mall was once a staple of teenhood. Yet, our local Maryland mall bans teens past 4 p.m. And it’s seemingly common in other parts of the country. New Jersey’s oldest mall, Westfield Garden State Plaza, implemented a similar policy in 2023, as did a Pittsburgh mall and Del Amo Fashion Center in Los Angeles, the largest in the Western U.S.

Sometimes, even the movies are a no-go. According to AMC, the largest movie theater chain in the country, kids under 17 may need to show up with an adult, even to see a kid-friendly movie. At our local AMC, teenagers need a parent or guardian present after 5 p.m. But the page advises, “For some theatres, adult supervision is required all day.” And a quick Google search brings up tons of conversations about stores and other businesses banning teens—even some grocery stores.

Katie Dongorra, a Baltimore-area mom who works in finance, says her teen daughter has had similar negative, even jarring, experiences. She told Fast Company that her teen was also harassed and kicked out of a grocery store by a police officer who asked her age, then told her he’d be monitoring her transaction.

“It’s been two years and I’m still mad about it,” Dongorra said.

Businesses seem to be banning teens over claims of disruptions to other customers. For example, the L.A. mall banned teens after a brawl broke out. And a Pennsylvania Chick-fil-A that restricts diners under 16 without a guardian said that it was over noise, “unsafe behaviors,” and mistreatment of the location’s employees.

However, while teenagers have always brought a, perhaps, noisier, more dynamic presence to the establishments they frequent, crime, including violent crime, has been falling among teens in recent years. According to a September 2024 report from the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), all incidents involving youths have notably dropped.

“Juvenile offending (total incidents) was about 14% lower, and the total number of juveniles involved was around 18% lower, in 2022 than in 2016, the beginning of the study period,” the report explains.

If teen crime isn’t radically rising, then the increasing practice of banning teens in public places is at best curious and at worst intolerant. And it may not even have the impact that businesses are hoping for.

Where to spend it?

Recent data on shoplifting supports the idea that bans aren’t practical or helpful for business, at least when it comes to keeping out shoplifters. That’s because shoplifting isn’t isolated to teens.

In fact, most shoplifters are adults. A 2024 LendingTree survey found that 90% of recent shoplifting was motivated by inflation—not rebellious teen attitudes. According to the data, the groups most likely to shoplift are those with young children in the home (27%) and millennials ages 28 to 43 (26%).

Banning kids from stores might not curb shoplifting, but it will certainly curb the ability of kids to spend money in those stores. Instead, they’ll just spend their earnings online. Jennifer Seitz, a financial education instructor and director of education at Greenlight, the debit card for kids that helps them learn to track and manage funds, tells Fast Company that kids are spending more than ever.

“Teens have significant spending power, so businesses that exclude or ban them may be leaving significant money on the table,” she explains.

While Seitz says kids are still spending plenty in malls and shopping centers, most of the money they are spending is now happening from home. “Spending habits have increasingly shifted online, with a rise in online shopping and food delivery platforms that offer convenience, variety, and on-demand access,” Seitz says.

Of course, much of modern shopping happens from our phones, but when it comes to teenagers who, at one point, craved being out and about, the shift feels alarming. Yet, with kids being banned from so many establishments, the spending-from-home trend makes sense.

Bad business or not, kicking out perfectly well-behaved teens leaves parents feeling like they have nowhere to drop their older children off anymore to hang out. It also may be bad for kids. Joe Sugarman, a dad and writer, tells Fast Company that his 15-year-old, now 16, was kicked out of one Maryland mall, and warned at another.

“We try to get these kids off their phones and out of their bedrooms and teach them some independence, but they have nowhere to go,” he explained. He recalled that even the state fair has the same policy, quipping, “What teen wants their old dad hanging out with them as they flirt with boys and hope for their first kiss on the top of the Ferris wheel?”

Sugarman says policies like these make it practically impossible for parents to plan and schedule their own lives around their teens’ hangouts, especially when they’re expected to be nearby.

Only the lonely

As inconvenient all this might be for modern parents, there are more serious consequences for teens, experts say.

A 2023 commentary in The Journal of Pediatrics by Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, pointed to the loss of “independent activities,” like shopping or hitting up a movie sans parents, as a culprit for the well-documented decline in children’s mental health in recent years. Gray tells Fast Company that we shouldn’t pretend this trend doesn’t negatively impact kids and their understanding of their place in the world.

“If we want kids to grow up with a sense of agency, with the confidence required to engage the real world around them, we must grant them, as they grow, ever increasing freedom to explore public spaces independently of adult control,” he says.

Jessi Gold, MD, MS, author and chief wellness officer of the University of Tennessee System’s Psychiatry Department, who works with teens and young adults, agrees. Gold worries about how the trend impacts those on the cusp of adulthood.

“Loneliness is a rampant problem in our society, and community building, especially offline, is lacking in younger generations,” Gold tells Fast Company. “We know loneliness contributes significantly to the mental health crisis . . . we need to be encouraging spaces where teens can safely have fun with friends, not prohibiting them.”

Gold also explains that the teen years are a huge time for growth and discovering one’s identity and learning social skills, so in-person time with friends is massively important.

“As a psychiatrist who sees college students, I worry that if we stop allowing high schoolers the ability to socialize with their friends alone and in non-school or online spaces, that they would struggle making friends and forming a community more than they already have post-COVID on campus,” Gold says.

Who actually gets banned?

There is also the glaring issue of how businesses enforce bans across different races. Sugarman believes that teen bans are more common in racially diverse areas, and recalls a friend who lives in a mostly white area of Massachusetts being “gobsmacked” when he explained that such policies exist in his state.

He’s not alone in worrying about the racial dynamics that may come with sweeping age restrictions. Meg St-Esprit, a journalist and Pittsburgh mom, who has kids of different races, tells Fast Company that she’s seen racial profiling firsthand. “Our nice mall has this policy and it is absolutely not evenly enforced,” she shared. “My two boys walking together, one white, one black, ahead of me. Guess which one got asked where his adult was?”

Of course, it’s up to businesses to equally enforce the policies they create. But as for the policies themselves, it’s legal for establishments to create and modify their guidelines, including restricting younger clientele. As long as they aren’t restricting customers based on federally protected categories such as race, religion, national origin or disability, they’re in the clear.

That doesn’t mean those policies are kind, or fair, and it doesn’t mean they are good for teens.

Any adult who remembers the first freedoms of going to the grocery store, the mall, or the movies alone knows how formative those experiences were. I used to roam the mall for hours with groups of friends—Hot Topic, Spencer’s Gifts, and a since-shuttered Silver Diner on the bottom level where I ate my body weight in cheese fries. I had my first dates at movie theaters and at Chinese food restaurants. Being out in the world, spending my own money, was, in part, where I learned to be self-sufficient, and also social.

Sure, there are parking lots and fields to hang out in. But if we widely ban teens from businesses, we ban them from so many necessary lessons, like how to talk to a salesperson or not spend all your money in one place.

Instead, they’re learning that they aren’t to be trusted. We are essentially forcing them to stay home, and then—poof—expecting them to know how to navigate the world as fully functional adults. If we don’t get rid of the leashes while they’re young and supposed to be learning how to be part of society, we shouldn’t be surprised by how radically society as a whole changes once they’re grown.