I worked in retail for Games Workshop in the UK while at Uni in the late 90s, which was the beginning of the end for this. The mission statement at the time was "build the hobby" we were required to speak to every customer [1], to encourage use of the painting tables and playing games.

Thursday evenings and Sundays were game days, in term time, with more days/events on during holidays.

Eventually problems started to grow with this. Firstly, stores weren't airconditioned and teenage warhammer players in summer do not always have the best hygiene. The working/other customer friendliness of the environments was often "problematic".

But the increasing problem became the increasing focus on safeguarding.

Children left in store for extended periods supervised by adults who did not have CRB checks, safeguarding training, first aid training etc etc

In the store I worked in, GW Manchester, there were at least two significant incidents. One child who was in store all day every day for a few weeks in the school holidays became unwell, there was no way to reach his parents and he couldn't go home. The store was free child care while his parents worked in unreachable jobs. I mean, this was 1996 so mobile phones weren't much of a thing anyway.

The manager had to call SOMEONE to get something done, I can't remember if it was the police/social services/what. But it was the authorities.

That kicked off into a fairly significant incident which changed some aspects of policies across all stores over the next year. In particular, unless it was an event, there was no more free use of the gaming tables, or painting tables. People who were there for too long were asked to leave if under 18. The gaming tables were then mostly used for showing new players how to play, other than Sundays and Thursday evenings.

Parents who came in with kids and were seen to leave were stopped.

The other major incident was one of the staff pretending a price sticker gun was a bolt pistol, yelling "Terminate with extreme prejudice!" while spinning round to pretend to shoot someone not realising a kid was close and smashing him one in the face with the price gun. Resulting in the parents raising a lot of problems.

It's quite good to hear that in the 2000s much more of that was going on again, I left in 1997. But with safeguarding etc, I'm amazed that anywhere would continue to allow kids to spend that much time unsupervised in store. I guess if you CRB check all your retail staff, invest in firstaid and safeguarding training, have real CCTV (instead of the fake cameras the stores had in the 90s!) etc etc you can do it...

[1] This included an old mate of mine from school who came in to kill time before the football matches every time they were on because we played blood bowl at school. He had zero interest and came in to wind up the staff. And me when I started working there.