A few months ago when I was working at the restaurant on like an early evening when it was still sunshine-y out, I was standing by a table helping them with my back to the door, when suddenly I hear a lot of loud voices rising, and at first I block it out because I just assume it's a table getting loud and rowdy, but then it got just a bit too loud, and I look and it's like (four) (black) (juveniles) in crisp white t-shirts, standing in the doorway and one has walked like ten feet into the restaurant, and a few of them are singing, and it seems like some big dare, and then they run out the door and I can see them outside by the one patio table that's out there, and three go around one side of the people sitting there, and one is kind of on their other side and passes around them that way, which is a very unnatural way to walk since it's a tight space between the restaurant's exterior-facing wall and its big window, and the chairs of the customers that they have pushed out.
And, I brush it off and keep working since it's fairly busy, and then like four or five minutes later I'm out on the patio to see the customers there, and like two storefronts down I see the same 4 kids leaving the staircase entry that goes up to an upstairs (Chinese karaoke lounge), and as they round the corner and go out of my sight, out from that staircase bursts a (shorter) (early 40s) (Asian) man in shorts and glasses, and he hustles out to the far edge of the sidewalk so he can see them, and he holds his phone up over his head to record them, and as he does that, I hear a metal reverberating sound, like someone struck the back of a street-sign hard, to make it reverberate.
So, I immediately pick up my phone and call 911, to let them know about this group of teens running into successive local businesses to pull shit, and I tell them what they look like, the direction of travel, etc., and as I do that, I see that the last chair in our patio section at a far unoccupied table is flipped over, and so I tell the 911 operator that they had toppled furniture on our patio, it seems.
And, after that I'm inside talking to my coworkers, and my one (Chinese from China) coworker says that he saw them when they were around the outside patio table with the four customers around it, and like one of them darted in and touched or grabbed something off the table.
"What the fuck," I was like, and I said that you just don't know what a group like that are doing and will do, and if they go into the liquor store down the way and are rowdy, one could accidentally topple a shelf and the owner could lose like hundreds of dollars of merchandise.
My (Chinese from China) coworker then said that this does happen rarely in the town, and that something similar happened a year or two ago when he was working for a nearby coffee shop, and that included kids saying they wanted charitable contributions and they took Venmo or Zell or whatever, and then when someone went to contribute, they snatched the phone and transferred like $2000 into their account.
"What the fuck," I was like, saying that I'd heard of stuff like that happening in big cities, but not where we live.
"They see it on TikTok," he was like. "They see it and imitate it."
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