I'm suprised from this thread (and the previous one) the number of people that can't comprehend this side of the story. These crowds do real damage to the businesses by driving away customers (in the case of the Sonic, some guy who has probably invested his life savings into a Sonic franchise was probably watching everything he had go down the drain.)
It will be interesting to see more coverage on this. The original story seem poorly researched (very little fact checking) and it seems very biased. All the kids are "straight A" students, or they were a customer. There were not 425 straight A all shopping at K-Mart.
They were having National Honor Society meeting at Sonic...and suddenly, for no reason at all, right in the middle of the Awards ceremony ( which was running late because everyone had gotten into an intense debate on existentialist merits of 'scrunchies' as a generational protest prop )....the cops showed up, and like, you know, just busted everybody for just breathing air.
You are kidding right? Any fast food restarant owner would kill to have those kinds of crowds at 12:30 at night. I can see the k-mart wanting to get rid of them and perhaps the other business's which were all probably closed at that hour. So they were not driving away customers but may have been worried about vandalism. That was definately not true of the Sonic drive in.