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Shopping Centers Today -> October 2001
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CENTERS TURN TO CURFEWS AS LAST RESORT TO COPE WITH TEENS
By Debra Hazel
James C. Kramer, CSM, manager of Colonial Mall, had a problem. His center in Brunswick, Ga., had become a hangout for loitering teens and, more alarmingly, a surrogate baby-sitter for younger children.
“This weekend, we had six little girls between 3 and 9 years old in the mall at 11 p.m. waiting for a ride,” he said one day in August. “We once had a 9-year-old and a 13-year-old here at 1 a.m. on a weekend, waiting for a ride.” In both cases, center security and local police made sure the children got home.
For Colonial Properties, owner of the mall, the solution was to establish a parental escort policy; it was the second mall in the Colonial portfolio to do so. To shop in the center on Friday and Saturday evenings, children under 18 must be accompanied by an adult.
The move was made after other measures taken over 18 months had proved ineffective, Kramer said.
Colonial, based in Birmingham, Ala., is not alone. Last March, CBL & Associates Properties established a similar requirement at its Hamilton Place mall in Chattanooga, Tenn., its second project to do so. Yet in establishing escort policies, center managers are facing an issue still controversial in the industry: how to deal with unruly youngsters, who can be a mall nuisance today, while not alienating potential shoppers of tomorrow.
As a result, parental escort policies, or curfews, remain relatively rare; the largest mall developers have curfews at less than a handful of centers, and some have none at all. Mall of America is the only center in Simon Property Group’s portfolio to have a curfew policy, and General Growth Properties (GGP) also has only one in place; The Rouse Co. has just two such programs.
“It’s probably the most extreme measure you can take,” said David Levenberg, corporate director of security for GGP, Chicago, which has a program at Oglethorpe Mall in Savannah, Ga.
Perhaps the best-known escort policy is the one established in 1995 by Mall of America, requiring that a parent or adult guardian accompany anyone under 16 on Friday and Saturday evenings.
“We were faced with thousands of unsupervised kids coming in on weekends,” recalled Maureen Cahill, the Bloomington, Minn., mall’s director of public relations.
At the time, the move generated massive publicity, much of it negative. But the program was effective, Cahill said: Incidents dropped from 300 in 1995 to two the next year.
Programs around the United States vary over the restricted hours, the minimum ages and the number of children each adult may escort. But all of the developers that have imposed curfews insist they did so to avoid potentially dangerous situations — and only after exhausting all other alternatives.
“We didn’t have control of our shopping center,” said Barbara Ivankovich, SCMD, CBL’s vice president of corporate mall marketing for Hamilton Place. Downtown Chattanooga had imposed a curfew on teen-agers, and they had migrated over to the mall. Fights were starting, entrances were being blocked and some stores had reported problems. Even the chief of police noted that something had to be done.
The mall had already installed a closed-circuit television system and increased security. When those measures proved insufficient, Hamilton Place banned unescorted youths under 18 between 6 p.m. and the mall’s 9 p.m. closing time on Friday and Saturday.
“Since then, we’ve seen a significant decrease in security-related incidents, and seen the return of families to the center,” said manager Henry Jones.
Unsupervised children were the main reason that Colonial Mall Macon (Ga.) started requiring that kids 15 and under be accompanied by an adult in the mall’s common areas. Guest passes are given to youngsters age 12 to 15, except on Friday and Saturday nights, allowing them to shop unescorted as long as an adult responsible for them is somewhere in the center.
“Parents were dropping off kids, who were not being watched or taken care of by anyone,” said Aimee Lashley, CMD, the center’s marketing director. “This wasn’t incident-related. It was more pre-emptive to stop problems before they happened.”
Oglethorpe Mall’s curfew was put into effect in 1997 after other measures proved ineffective against parents who, for instance, dropped off 10-year-olds for the day, and teen-agers who were getting into fights.
“But it wasn’t just the fights: 150 people would gather around to watch, and we had situations where security couldn’t get through to break it up,” said Phil McConnell, SCSM, the center’s manager. “We couldn’t stand for it.”
Crown American Realty’s Chambersburg (Pa.) Mall banned unescorted teens in March 1998. There is no police department in the rural area around the center, and the mall had to rely on its own security. But, unlike many other communities, Chambersburg did not immediately welcome the policy: The town was concerned that, unable to enter the mall, the kids would hang out on the streets, reported Mindy Lange, CMD, the mall’s manager.
Despite the success of existing programs, other major mall developers oppose them, reluctant to ban any shopper.
“Westfield America is available to all customers,” said Catharine Dickey, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based developer.
Macerich Co. and Kravco Co. say likewise.
“I think it’s wrong. First of all, teens are a challenge, but they are customers; they also are your future consumers,” said Clinton Cochran, SCSM, vice president of asset management for Kravco, King of Prussia, Pa. “You deal with the problems if you have problems.”
Kravco has worked closely with its communities, developing a program called “Peace Talks. Violence Walks. Use Your Voice … Impact Your World,” (SCT, September 2000) to give teen-agers outlets to express themselves and feel comfortable in the centers. The firm’s Oxford Valley Mall in Langhorne, Pa., draws four times the number of teen-agers that are in its market, yet Kravco said it “hasn’t had a complaint.
“How is a teen going to shop with a parent? They want to go to Hot Topic,” Cochran said.
But the malls with escort policies say that sales at all of their stores actually rise once the curfew is imposed. Kramer, of Colonial Mall Brunswick, said his merchants wanted to start the program almost immediately after it was announced.
Tenants at Hamilton Place were equally enthusiastic. “We received a standing ovation from our merchants; our customers were uncomfortable at night, and so were our merchants,” said Jones, the manager. Even stores catering to the teen-age customer say they have seen sales increases since the policy went into effect.
Since the launch of Chambersburg Mall’s policy, the mall has signed leases with such teen-oriented stores as American Eagle and Pacific Sunwear.
“They felt the market was strong enough, and that they were going to get kids that were there to shop,” Lange said.
The important thing to emphasize is that the mall is not excluding teen-agers; it is simply requesting that they have a responsible adult with them at specific times, GGP’s Levenberg said.
Still, no one expects a proliferation of these programs, given fears about negative publicity and discrimination suits.
While Levenberg said that several GGP center managers have discussed imposing an escort policy in the past year, “once you really start looking at what you have to do to put these projects in place, it changes a lot of their minds.”
There is a lot of cost as well. Oglethorpe Mall added 300 security staff man-hours when its curfew went into effect in 1997.
“I have one of the highest security budgets at GGP,” McConnell admitted.
But programs can be rolled back once a problem is under control, noted Jonathan Lusher, senior vice president of consulting and inspectional services of security consulting firm IPC International, Bannockburn, Ill. Crown American’s Patrick Henry Mall, Newport News, Va., rescinded the curfew, only eight weeks after imposing it (see story above). Macon Mall also has relaxed its program somewhat.
But about a year after instituting its curfew, Oglethorpe Mall tried cutting back on its hours, with less-heartening results.
“We kept it for a month, and saw such a drastic rise [in incidents] that we had to clamp it down,” McConnell said.
There has been no research to assess the long-term effects of bans, but kids don’t seem to hold a grudge. Mall of America’s Cahill says several teens have shown up on their 16th birthday to prove a point.
“It’s a valid tool in the toolbox, one with a lot of advantages and disadvantages,” Lusher said, “But they certainly have been effective.”
RESCINDING AN ESCORT POLICY
Most regional malls that have introduced parental escort policies over the years have kept them. Patrick Henry Mall is a rare exception. The 643,000-square-foot center in Newport News, Va., instituted a curfew in 1995 after its manager walked his own center anonymously one weekend in response to customer complaints.
“I’d get calls on Monday mornings from customers saying ‘I’m never coming back,’” recalled manager Roger Brown.
What he saw — crowds of kids essentially taking over the center — scared him into immediate action.
He imposed, without corporate permission, a ban on teens from 6 p.m. to closing on Friday and Saturday nights. “I put my career on the line.”
Luckily for him, his superiors were supportive, even though officials knew the center and the company would receive negative press, said Christine Menna, CMD, vice president of corporate communications for Crown American Realty Trust, the mall’s Johnstown, Pa.-based owner/manager.
Shortly after imposing the ban, however, Brown met with various church and school groups, and the teens themselves tried to come up with an alternative to the ban.
“They wanted to know how to come back,” he said.
The kids created a system of identification cards, and volunteered to let security know when a potential troublemaker is in the mall. The program worked so well that the curfew was lifted after just eight weeks and has not been instituted since.
— D.H.
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