From the Purcellville, Virginia Police Department:
Yesterday, March 18, 2020, an incident occurred at a local grocery store involving juveniles reportedly coughing on produce, while filming themselves and posting it on social media. Police responded and are currently investigating the incident. The grocery store immediately removed the items in question, and has taken appropriate measures to ensure the health of store patrons.
We are asking for parental assistance in monitoring your teenagers’ activities, as well as their social media posts to avoid the increase of any further such incidents. We have learned that this appears to be a disturbing trend on social media across the country, and we ask for help from parents to discourage this behavior immediately. Please talk with your children and explain to them why such behavior is wrong, especially given the current situation regarding the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19). …
Ah, those wacky, wacky kids! Well, they’ll grow out of it, right?
Here’s a poll:
Ethics Alarms 
Oh for heaven’s sake. I may think that the world is overreacting to this crisis, but sheesh!
We need to have Andy Griffith give them a stern talking to.
Hot off the press:
https://babylonbee.com/news/springbreakers-arrange-scattered-corpses-to-spell-out-yolo
The kid’s parents should be forced to pay for all the produce and the sanitizing of tbe merchandising equipment . That should run into the thousands of dollars.
Then publicise their names
Agreed. This should be a choice on the poll, though the incident could just have been counted inevitable.
My favorite, though, is removing all access to devices, including tv, providing pen and paper and assigning 100+ word essays (depending on grade) on the old-fashioned subject “Why Doing So-and-So is a Bad Idea” and giving them to teachers with the virus to correct and approve.
#2 has merit, but I can’t imagine subject anyone to that.
I’m a little dismayed, though, that so many respondents seem to think permanently destroying these idiots’ reputations and, essentially, ruining their lives is an appropriate reaction. Granted, what they did is stupid and insensitive, I know, shocking that teenagers can be stupid and insensitive, but no one was actually harmed. A stern talking to and the parents’ having to pay for the lost food seems to me the best way to handle it.
We are all harmed by the destruction of value by these kids. The produce can never be sold, the displays must be sanitized and consumers lost purchase opportunities. Those costs will be absorbed by thousands of buyers over time while the perpetrators walk away with little financial cost. Paying dearly for one’s stupid stunts will be a better teacher than incarceration or community service.
Not to mention the ways we’re paying for the panic produced by stories like this. When my local Facebook witch hunting brigade catches wind of this, they’ll start demanding that everyone in the grocery store must have a dedicated armed guard watching them… from the appropriate distance, of course.
You must be kidding.
Require community service. Without their phones.
A beating by the men of the community to the point that never, ever would they attempt such a thing again.
You don’t have take them behind the woodshed for an attitude adjustment, I’d vote for that.
Quarantine them in county facilities so they can’t do it again. 14 days behind bars should do it. No criminal record, this is not imprisonment, just solitary confinement in a cell.
It’s the sort of thing for which it would be useful to reinstitute the stocks.
At least they weren’t knocking people to the ground and kicking them in the head or stomping on their heads.
If Barack Obama had a son, his son would look just like these children.
Elsewhere, them being immediately chucked into some stinking jail run by a truncheon-carrying brute named Bubba (or the ethnic equivalent) for a few months would be the best case scenario.
Here? Well, two years from now some judge will find the store guilty of culpable negligence for failing to secure the produce and the police guilty of traumatizing the innocent children, then award the parents $$$$$ in restitution.
It’s fairly common in teenagers to be more responsive to the motivation of boldness/wrath. This doesn’t necessarily involve anger. Rather, it deals with overcoming limits or violating rules. In this case, the kids apparently have such low self-respect that trying to get away with something so petty and mean-spirited is fun and enjoyable for them.
To educate them, I would find someone they would respect (maybe someone slightly older and much cooler than them) to tell the kids how unimpressive they are, and then make them learn to do something useful and versatile that requires discipline. Maybe cooking (with the vegetables they coughed on; bonus points for irony). Then they’d have a basis for self-worth that doesn’t revolve around the ability to commit minor transgressions.