Lego shopper, 11 and alone, detained
Tadhg Dunlop is 11 years old and, like a lot of kids his age, he loves Lego. He loves its nuances, how the different pieces fit with the different sets, and he loves shopping for Lego, alone, with the permission of his parents.
But at the Lego Store in Calgary’s Chinook Centre that’s a problem. Young Tadhg, whose house is 4.8 kilometres from the Lego Store door, hopped on his bike with $200 in his pocket — money earned from babysitting and doing chores — last Sunday and pedalled off to the mall to buy some Lego.
His father had groceries to get and arranged to meet his son at the store later. But when Doug Dunlop arrived there was a problem. Tadhg had been detained for the modern day crime of shopping alone.
“Tadhg was in the corner of the store — he wasn’t mashed into the corner or tied up or anything — he was playing with some Lego, but probably feeling a little nervous, because a security guard was looking over his shoulder,”
his father says.
“I thought maybe he had done something wrong, like bumped a shelf, and had some Lego boxes fall off and get damaged. But I couldn’t even really imagine why he would be detained.”
Tadhg was a loyal customer. He had been shopping at the store by himself ever since he was nine. There had never been a problem before. And his dad, while a Lego fan, though not of equal magnitude, had no problem letting him exercise his consumer choices without parental supervision.
Tadhg rides his bike to school. He can find a bathroom. And he can count his money. So when a Lego Store employee approached him Sunday and started asking questions, he was flattered. Perhaps they had heard of his awesome Lego skills and wanted to hire him? He had built a giant Lego locomotive in the past, and was working on a new monster project — an eight-wheeled off-road vehicle. Hence the trip to buy more Lego.
But the nice Lego employee had other motives. He wanted information. He wanted to know Tadhg’s age. And when he said 11, mall security was dispatched to the scene.
Calls to Calgary’s Lego Store Thursday were referred to the brand’s U.S. headquarters.
“Our primary concern is for children’s safety and as such we have a policy regarding unaccompanied minors in our stores,” Michael McNally, a senior spokesman for Lego, wrote in an email to the National Post. “As this customer was under the age of 12 and unaccompanied, our store staff followed our guidelines and alerted mall security.”
Doug Dunlop is a child of the ’70s, an era where kids walked to school, climbed trees, played road hockey, jumped off swings, had chestnut fights — and playground play fights — and went to the store to buy their parents cigarettes. The 47-year-old electrical engineer understands the world has changed. He just didn’t realize how much.
And it is not just a Calgary thing, but an everywhere, everyday thing: an irrational bludgeoning of parental authority and general common sense that, in its absurd extreme, saw some RCMP officers recently issue a warning to a couple in B.C. for letting their four-year-old son play outside naked.
“There has been a shift as to how overprotective we have become,” Dunlop says. “But it had not occurred to me that the shift was so severe as to prevent an 11-year-old from buying toys in a toy store.” (A Mastermind Toys store in Toronto has no similar policy. An employee said children, ages 10 or 11, often pop in unaccompanied by an adult to look around.)
Dunlop expressed his chagrin at the Lego Store rules to staff who, he says, suggested he was a bad parent for leaving Tadhg unattended, because bad things can happen when an 11-year-old boy shops
He had been shopping at the store by himself since he was nine
alone in a Lego Store 4.8 km from his front door.
Dunlop reasons that bad things happen everywhere. And that the worst thing that could happen in a Lego Store would be if a tall person were to reach for an item on a shelf, triggering a Lego avalanche that landed on his son’s head.
A Lego Store district manager suggested another possible scenario, according to Dunlop: what if the mall were evacuated for an emergency, what then for Tadhg?
Well, Doug replied, he could hop on his bike and ride home.
But what now for the Dunlops, and their Lego-loving kid? Boycott a beloved brand?
“Tadhg’s a Lego evangelist,” his father says. “I am not depriving him of that.”
No. He has a better idea. Tadhg can find a toy store where it is not a crime to be an 11-year-old kid.