Let me set the scene for you. You're an eighteen year old employee at a pet store in suburban America. As you are getting ready to close the store a group of middle school aged girls walks into the store and they immediately begin creating chaos. They walk around the store knocking things over, aggravating paying customers, and disrupting the employee's progress on their tasks and the entire time myself or another employee has to go and clean the mess up after they move to the next aisle.
All of a sudden in the next aisle over you hear one of the girls say to another "Should I throw it?". Your immediate thought is, there is no actual way that this girl is going to throw something. But, as the thought crosses your mind, you hear a crash come from the other side of the shelf. So, you half-halfheartedly walk towards the aisle they are in and as you come around the corner you see them all standing and laughing around a puddle of ice and coffee from their Starbucks coffee cups. Then, they begin kicking the ice under the shelf where it would be much harder to clean up. Keeping in mind that you do not want to get fired today, but also want to scare the crap out of them you turn the bend and say in the toughest voice you can muster "Hey! Can you not do that please!" If looks could kill, you would have been dead right there on the spot. You give them a look right back and carefully walk away because you now have to go and get a mop and mop up the coffee mess that they had just made.
When this happened to me, I was in complete shock. My parents had always taught me to be respectful of the environments that I was in, especially when we were in public. When I was in middle school, I was not allowed to wander shopping plaza's aimlessly creating havoc for the employees at all of the stores. If I had been allowed to wander around by myself, you had best believe that I was not acting out. I knew that my parents knew a lot of people and if someone they knew saw me acting like that and it got back to them I would be in a world of trouble.
I am not a parent, so I cannot sit here and preach like I know the ins and outs of parenting. I can only give you the perspective of a young adult who has had wonderful parents to teach her the right way to act. When I would go out with my friends, we would have fun and that fun would not be creating a hellish workplace for the employees of the stores that we entered.
To all of you teenagers or almost teenagers: you can have fun with yours friends without creating issues for other people. Show respect to the people that are around you even when you don't know them. Their lives do not revolve around you. Maybe one day you will realize how annoying it is when you have your own job, but by then you'll have grown out of it. Show the world that you are not just another annoying teenager because the people around you will be very grateful if you make their day even a little bit less chaotic.