In the US, a business can refuse service to anyone, generally, as long as it isn’t because the person belongs to a protected class (e.g. you can’t ban all black people or all Jewish people). You could refuse to do business with someone because you didn’t like the way they looked at you, or because you were grumpy the day they came in.

Famously, for example, James Dolan bans all sorts of people he doesn’t like from Madison Square Garden and any of the other venues he owns. He notoriously bans all lawyers who work for any firm that sues him (which happens a lot). He even uses facial recognition to catch them, and kicks them out without refunding their tickets. People have tried to sue him for this (many of them are lawyers, after all!) and so far no one has won against him for it, so he keeps doing it.

Here is an article about it: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/45949758/new-york-knicks...

IIUC, that article is written in 2025 and cites stuff pre-2023.

IN 2023 the city threatened them with violating the terms of their liquor license [1] (which doesn't prevent you from refusing service to anybody short of actually illegal behavior). I can't really find any follow-up about this.

[1]: https://nypost.com/2023/12/06/business/msg-could-lose-its-li...

Doesn't prevent you from refusing short of illegal. Incredible sequence of negatives there.

The doesn't doesn't belong.

Not my world, but I respect this. Imagine how fun it would be to own, say, Disneyland and keep AI-enforced ban lists for your every whim.

Glasshole 2.0? No Mickey for Meta!

Good to see Dolan is not the only one corruptible by power

> a business can refuse service to anyone

In Colorado, such service refusals are illegal. The civil rights agency prosecutes them and their legal rationale is that historically every "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" has only been used to discriminate against non-white customers.

> Rule 20.4 – Discriminatory Signage in Places of Public Accommodation.

> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:

> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”

> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited.

https://www.sos.state.co.us/CCR/GenerateRulePdf.do?ruleVersi...

Just because it is unlawful to display certain signs does not mean that refusing service to customers is unlawful.

Interesting. I’m surprised about that rule. To me, it seems like a first amendment violation.

Generally most businesses are allowed to refuse service to customers for any reason, or no reason at all (there are certain legal exceptions to that principle for protected classes). As a practical matter, banned online bettors often sneak back in with strawman accounts.

Companies outside of betting do this regularly. I know a guy who is banned from returning stuff at Best Buy.

Can you explain how you see this as the same thing? And not returns fraud?

It’s not returns fraud - he was operating entirely within their policy, just returned too much stuff too often and BB eventually figured out they weren’t making money off him.

I don’t think he was even intending to return things when he bought them. Dude just had high standards.

What kind of arbitrage makes money returning things to Best Buy?

Something stupidly easy to catch, like putting a different TV in the box.

Fraud

Years and years ago I had the misfortune of knowing someone that bragged about how he'd buy a video card at best buy, swap a dead card in it, then redo the shrink wrap at his job (an indie computer place) before returning it. There's lots of banal scummy scams you can do like that.

I specifically know of people who abuse the Best Buy membership alongside the return policy to essentially rent equipment for periods of time.

Likewise. The guy bought two laptops to compare for a week and returned the one he didn’t like, then later that year did the same thing between two TVs. When he went to return the TV he didn’t want, he was told he was banned from returning any other good to Best Buy and it’s monitored against his credit card.

He now pays with cash.

Perhaps after just two events that might seem a little harsh, but I definitely understand the store's reasoning here. You've got a guy that is pretty much guaranteed to lose you money in the form of his regular auditioning of big ticket items (can't sell that returned item for full price anymore). Why would a store want to keep a customer like that?

Even if you pay with cash, they still check your ID when you return things and keep track of how much you return.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. I've definitely seen my fair share of people on Reddit who seem to regularly have the misfortune of opening video card boxes only to find rocks inside. Multiple times -- just a coincidence, I'm sure. Not saying the person you know does this, but return scamming is definitely a thing.

This dude wasn’t doing that, he was just using Best Buy as an extended trial period for whatever new gadgets looked cool. Eventually they decided they weren’t making any money off him.

A brick and mortar casino down here banned a guy for some bathroom activity. But made him agree that it’s to everyone’s advantage if they agreed it was because he was a sharp.

There are absolutely companies that “stack rank” their customers and cut the bottom N%, or even just keep the top N, period.

I have always found this to be maddeningly counterintuitive, because surely at least some of these customers yield a net profit. But I have to admit that I’ve seen it done to very profitable effect.