Designing Store Access
Why do stores expect handicapped customers to walk halfway across the store to get a shopping scooter?
In-store scooters aside, the rant raised a number of other issues for me (and, I’m presuming, people who legitimately need handicap parking and minimized walking distance, and have the documentation to prove it):
- people who park in handicap spaces because they’re lazy
- people who block access to handicap spaces because “they’re waiting for someone who just went in for one thing”
- people who park in handicap spaces because they think they’re immune to prosecution (this includes uniformed local service, store and site management, etc.)
- people who park in handicap spaces “because they’re pregnant”
and so on.
Lately, the rant has expanded to include delivery-service drivers, online pickups, and ride-share drop-offs (many of whom now have preferred-parking spots even closer to the entrance than the designated handicap-parking spots). Most of these issues boil down to one thing: time. BOPIS and delivery services — industry hype aside — exist because people are either too busy to shop, forgot (or were tasked with picking up) a last-minute item, or have limited transportation options (city bus routes and hours, otherwise mobility-limited, or are a caregiver for someone who needs specialized transportation). Other online-pickup/two-hour-or-less-delivery shoppers may be dealing with illness, or their immune systems would be put at risk by shopping n a crowded store (not your usual sort of “needs a handicap parking tag” customer).
But back to the scooters…
Where the handicap parking spots are (and their availability at any given time) notwithstanding, there are some real design and access issues involved with store-owned mobility scooters. When not in use, the scooters need to be plugged into an electrical outlet to charge their batteries. They also need to be kept under enough surveillance to keep them from being stolen. At the same time, they need to be readily available to customers who need them to do their shopping.
Let’s take three customers with mobility issues and valid handicap parking placards; we’ll call them Tom, Dick, and Harry*. Tom walks with a cane, but he tires easily. Dick uses a rollator, or walker on wheels. (Rollators often have storage compartments and/or seats. They provide more stability than a cane, and greater walking speed than a standard walker. They do not collapse as fully as walkers.) Harry has a manual wheelchair, but he finds it tiring to use over long periods of time. Sometimes these customers shop with their partners, but just as often, they’re independent cusses who would rather shop alone. Tom, Dick, and Harry do not represent all mobility-limited customers, but they represent three use cases in which a store mobility scooter can be a useful tool.
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If the handicap spots are close enough to the door, and the scooters just inside, Tom might — on a good day — be able to walk into the store, sit down on a scooter, plop his cane in the basket, and start shopping.
It’s harder for Dick to get into the store: he walks more slowly and may have to worry about tripping. If the walk is long enough, he may need to sit down on his rollator’s seat for a few minutes. (This is a definite hazard in a store parking lot, but if you have to stop and sit, you have to stop and sit.) When Dick gets to the mobility scooter, there's no safe place to put his rollator while he shops.
Harry has the same “where do I put it?” issue as Dick, except his wheelchair is larger and heavier than Dick’s rollator. Additionally, sometimes Harry needs another medical device, which can take up to half the space of the scooter’s front basket.
After shopping, Tom will often ride the scooter out to his car and leave it parked there for the store’s staff to ride back in and charge up. If there’s nobody to bring it in right away, the battery may run out of power and become very difficult to get back inside to charge up.
Dick and Harry don’t have that option. If their mobility devices were to be stored at Customer Service (the most likely option, as it is often there that the mobility scooters are plugged in), they might need to scooter out to their cars, unload their purchases, scooter back into the store, retrieve their own mobility devices, and then rollate or wheelchair back to their cars, respectively.
Stores I’ve spoken to say the best option is for Tom, Dick, and Harry to call Customer Service when they arrive at the store and have a store associate ride the mobility scooter out to their car for them. This often results in a long wait, as Customer Service is one of a store’s most-understaffed positions (largely because of high intra-day variability in demand). Tom, Dick, and Harry may be at the bottom of the list of customers with online pickups, customers with returns, customers looking to check out on a busy day, and customers with other specialized needs (such as purchasing baby formula or cigarettes at a supermarket, or picking up items stored in a locked cage upfront at a BJ’s or Costco). But even when they do get the scooters ridden out to them, most stores don’t have the dedicated staff to accompany Tom, Dick, or Harry back out to their cars after they check out, help them unload their purchases, and ride the scooter back into the store to its charging station. The scooters still end up in the middle of the parking lot, waiting for the cart attendant to drive it back into the store…
An option – not without significant cost – might be to install a mobility-scooter kiosk of sorts around a clustered arrangement of handicap parking spots, not unlike the cart corrals you see at many supermarkets and big-box stores. The kiosk would include scooter charging facilities so the devices would always be ready for customers who need them, and most customers would be able to leave their own mobility devices in their cars or vans. This arrangement would serve Tom well, but still might not be the best option for Dick. Harry would still need to worry about transferring into his wheelchair, wheeling over to the kiosk, transferring onto the scooter, and getting his wheelchair back to the car. Unfortunately, this option makes it too easy to steal a scooter, or to take one out for a “joy ride”**.
And speaking of “joy-riders”… the other day I saw a mobility-scooter in the middle of a row of non-handicap parking, completely blocking a car from getting out. (It had been sitting a while, so I can’t completely judge the shopper who left it there. I’d be really surprised if all the handicap spots were filled – but then again, not everyone with mobility issues has access to a handicap-parking placard.) I’m beginning to wonder if we need to issue something like a “handicap-access card” that would need to be inserted into a mobility-scooter in order to check it out for use. (This would be issued along with the parking placard.) I’m also wondering what features would be needed to redesign these vehicles in such a manner that Tom, Dick, and Harry would all to be able to use them without having to worry about their own devices getting lost or stolen.
A second parking-design possibility would be to move handicap parking into a bay at the side of the store — something roughly akin to a loading dock, but designed specifically for the use of customers with mobility limitations, to spare them from the danger associated with walking (or wheeling) slowly across the busy front of a large parking lot and to place them within yards of the mobility-scooter plug-in station. Again, it’s a costly option, and Corporate would whine because the store would lose sales-floor footage (or stockroom footage) and scooter-users might not get bombarded with the same barrage of impulse-purchase items that “able-bodied” shoppers have to endure.
There has to be a viable solution out there, but it will probably take placing mobility-limited, scooter-borrowing shoppers on store design teams to make it happen. And giving them a large enough voice to overcome the “equity” screams of the Door-Dashers and BOPIS-drive-ups to make it happen.
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- “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry” is an expression that can mean “everyone in a large group” or “any random person”, which is why I chose those names for my selected use-cases. In my area, they’re more likely to be elderly widows, and less likely middle-aged or younger shoppers (unless they’re recovering from sports injuries).
- “Joy-riders” is a term for people – usually teens too young to drive legally – who “borrow” a car to drive it around for fun. (This is illegal and often ends badly.) In this case I’m using it to refer to able-bodied people – usually young – who take the mobility scooters and ride them around the store (and/or the parking lot) for fun, making them unavailable for the people who need them.
