It’s Not The Kids…

I’ve commented before in this space about the way some people insist on taking small children to inappropriate venues for meals – a rant topic that actually takes in a lot of ground. In fairness, not many small children are going to be able to handle sitting quietly for the hours it will take for a fine dining restaurant to cycle their parents through a dinner seating; even for very well-behaved young people, two or three hours with absolutely nothing to do is a challenge, and by young people I include everyone under the age of forty. And, as previously noted, a restaurant doesn’t have to have white linen and $50-a-plate food to be inappropriate for kids – even our local bagel joint back in Redondo Beach offered very little for the under-twenty crowd to do. But what about the case of venues specifically intended for small children?

You might expect such a place – such as the familiar kid-oriented pizza chain called “Chuck E. Cheese” – to be completely bomb-proof, possibly literally. I mean, if you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of making a venue kid-proof, including furnishings that can’t easily be damaged by kicking, screaming, pulling, twisting, food fights, toilet-training accidents or random vomiting, there’s not much that can go wrong with the place, right? You can still have Health Code violations in the kitchen, breakdowns in the heating and cooling systems or random muggings in the parking lot, but the place itself should be free from behavior-related mishaps, right?

Unfortunately, this proves not to be the case. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal as reported on MSNBC there has been a definite increase in bad behavior occurring at the Chuck E. Cheese locations nationwide. Only, in all of the cases reported, the real problem seems to be the parents, not the kids…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything wrong with what this article refers to as the “mama bear” instinct. The sources quoted are quite correct in calling this an evolutionary development, and it’s probably true that none of us would be here if our parents didn’t have this instinct to one degree or another. I’m also not going to devote any space to wondering what all of this says about the decline of our society, or how much lower than this we can really get and still be called a civilization. I’m not sure what’s worse, an adult who would actually get physical with a six-year-old (however obnoxious) or a parent who would leave a six-year-old alone in a public place and allow the kid to be as obnoxious as they like in the first place. My interest is business, and my question is what you, as a business owner, are supposed to do about the situation…

Clearly, just letting it happen won’t do; you’ll be sued by all of the participants in the brawl, anyone else in the place who feels their kids were “traumatized” by seeing the brawl go down (or thinks they can get money for doing so, at least), and anyone who was inconvenienced by the police cars, ambulances, emergency rescue vehicles, or platoons of lawyers who will descend upon your establishment afterwards. Armed security, as attempted by one of the restaurant locations in the online story, doesn’t seem to be a good idea, either; you’ll end up with snide remarks about drawn pistols and bad movies…

By the same token, hiring unarmed security (or even a bouncer) for a kid’s pizza restaurant doesn’t seem like an appropriate response, and you could hardly expect your regular employees to intervene in the sort of altercation being reported in the news. You could require deposits, or raise prices enough to both cover the cost of extra personnel to maintain order and also compensate for refusing service to certain (troublemaking) customers, but you’d better include enough money to cover the lawsuits for discrimination against people on the basis of race, religion, or being the sort of idiot who starts fights over seating order in a kid’s pizza joint…

Why does he tell us about this, I hear some of you asking. Certainly, you’d never do anything as daft as opening a kid’s pizza place. The problem is, if the sense of entitlement (to do anything you please, whenever and wherever you want) and lack of regard for other people (including their property) that we’re seeing these days both continue to rise, sooner or later these same problems are going to affect your business, too…