There is an interesting analogy between "dirty pirates" and teens in malls.
Pretty much everyone younger than myself has had the experience of mall security severely hassling them as a teen or even as a young adult, pretty much just because their rentacops have a license to be jerks. Well, here I am a rather well paid dude with fat stacks of cash, but the mall doesn't want my type there, so it never even appears on the radar anymore. Malls are dead to anyone younger than perhaps 40. Not surprisingly they're generally not doing so well financially. Lots of dead / dying malls across the country.
If a company hates their primary and future customers enough, eventually those customers WILL go away permanently.
With B+N it might be location based or racial harassment etc because my screaming little kids (is there any other kind?) and I shop there and they don't mess with me. Then again I pass for a non-minority middle aged reasonably well dressed middle class dude. I suspect that is the key to their unwritten harassment policies.
What I'm getting at is perhaps 20 years ago there was hysteria about teens in malls being disruptive / troublemakers therefore rentacops to chase them away so the financially valuable moms and dads can shop in peace and comfort. I knew about the crackdown so I never even bothered going to the mall as a teen. As a young adult at lunch hour at my first real job, a business formal suit and tie establishment, I bought some nice expensive clothes, walking thru the mall to my car after obviously shopping at my lunch (I took off the sports coat of my business suit) and got severely hassled by a rentacop about what I'm doing there and where are my parents, etc. Pretty much like I heard they treat teens except they didn't call the cops and issue a loitering ticket to me. Never went back there again.
The long term problem with treating teens like dirt, is they eventually grow up into adults some of which have fat stacks of cash and would make fantastic customers, however there's no way in hell they're ever going back to that place again.
It appears mall security was very effective there. Nothing left in there but urbanware clothing, tennis shoes, cell phones, and really cheap jewelry left. Its not that the neighborhood has done downhill, can't count how many million dollar condos within a mile.
There is an interesting analogy between "dirty pirates" and teens in malls.
Pretty much everyone younger than myself has had the experience of mall security severely hassling them as a teen or even as a young adult, pretty much just because their rentacops have a license to be jerks. Well, here I am a rather well paid dude with fat stacks of cash, but the mall doesn't want my type there, so it never even appears on the radar anymore. Malls are dead to anyone younger than perhaps 40. Not surprisingly they're generally not doing so well financially. Lots of dead / dying malls across the country.
If a company hates their primary and future customers enough, eventually those customers WILL go away permanently.
With B+N it might be location based or racial harassment etc because my screaming little kids (is there any other kind?) and I shop there and they don't mess with me. Then again I pass for a non-minority middle aged reasonably well dressed middle class dude. I suspect that is the key to their unwritten harassment policies.