Teens & The Mall: A Love Story

When you're 13, live in suburbia, can't drive and want to meet up with your friends, the mall is pretty much the place to be. For me it was The Green Hills mall in Nashville, TN — back then it was brand new so there was a small foodcourt, a couple large department stores, a Benatton, Hello Kitty and Joe Boxer store, and not much else. We would hang out there most days after school at Harpeth Hell (I mean Hall — this was the girls school I didn't last long at). Dressed in our plaid skirts and saddle oxfords and oversized sweatshirts, we mostly just sat in the food court and gossiped. Ok we did do something else. We smoked clove cigarettes — in the mall's bathrooms. Did you know if you inhale deeply three times in a row on a clove, you get really dizzy for about 30 seconds? For some reason we thought this was fun. And there was a long hallway from the bathroom back to the mall, so we'd inhale and then trip out on our way out.

The Christian Science monitor has a story about the crackdown (including curfews and police escorts) on teen loiterers happening at many malls acorss the country. It's kind of a double edged sword — malls need teens and lots of mall stores cater to them, but when they're not there to shop, retailers say teens are "bad for business." I know rowdy teens can be a pill for store owners, but the crackdown does make me think we're losing some modern cultural rite of passage teens go through. What's a teen movie without a hanging out at the mall scene? Maybe we need more malls like YouthFutures, which julia & katie referred to in a recent Digital Graffiti….

Related:

Curfews Being Used to Tame Teen Mall Rats
Mall Minutia
Mall Rats

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.