Parking Entitlement?
A couple weeks ago, someone posted to my local Nextdoor feed a video, ranting at a local supermarket’s choice to put “curbside pickup” parking spots “for probably young and abled adults to get their groceries” in an area they felt should be reserved for handicap parking. The supermarket is one I occasionally patronize, but from what I could tell initially, I didn’t think the argument (and its responders, all agreeing and inflaming the issue) had a (prosthetic) leg to stand on.
The supermarket in question has three entrance areas. The smallest, on the far left, is a single door entry/exit by a bank of self-checkout stations. Beyond this are the dairy and frozen food sections. From the outdoor sidewalk, it gives out directly to a wide, hash-painted (“don’t block the box”) cutout, newly re-painted handicap/pedestrian access markings, and two rows of marked handicap parking with access paths on both sides of each vehicle spot. Since this is my usual point of entry to the store, to my eye it looks beautiful.
Closer to the center of the store is the “main entrance”. It feeds from both the left and the right, with separate entrance and exit doors on each side. One traverses a fairly long corridor to enter by the customer service desk, and then travel another couple of aisles to get to the produce department. To me, this seems like the longer path — especially when it drives traffic past the in-store Dunkin’ Donuts before it lets you into the store proper — but I might have missed a more important issue: where the electrical shopping carts (aka mobility scooters) might be parked.
On further inspection of the video, it looks like the store repurposed the fire zone/loading zone in front of the store from a marked yellow lane parallel to the raised curb to a set of seven “online pickup” parking spots perpendicular to the raised curb. (In addition to eliminating the fire access zone, this change has the end result of eliminating the pickup zone used by ride-share services.) The original poster’s thought was that online-pickup parking — which was literally right at the (raised) curb of the main entrance— should have been somewhere across the parking lot, that the ten-plus spacious handicap parking spaces should have been crammed into the seven tight pickup spaces. Factors in the store’s decision to place their short-term pickup parking there probably included issues of food safety (delivering perishables to the customers as quickly as possible) and the safety of the supermarket’s employees (who could have been run over by inattentive drivers — it has happened multiple times in broad daylight in the store at which I work!) as well as the cost and inconvenience of demolishing the raised curb (and the sidewalk leading to the entrance door) to replace it with something at road level (to accommodate wheelchairs). To their credit, the store did expand the number of handicap parking spots and made sure there were unload-access lanes on both sides of every handicap parking spot.
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There are many ways in which online-order pickup (BOPIS — “Buy Online, Pickup In Store”) has changed retail — and will continue to change it. Most of these fit under another set of topics. To most in-store shoppers, though, the parking-lot carveouts (and load-zone re-purposings) read as just another set of entitlements for specific classes of shoppers:
- Most stores have dedicated their closest-in parking spots for online pickup and for delivery services such as DoorDash. (One reason for delivery-service priority is that these services are timed, and a store’s rating depends in part upon how quickly their product is delivered to the customer’s home.) This is seen to favor customers who can afford the inflated prices, delivery and service fees, and tips associated with delivery services.
- The elimination of ride-share pickup and dropoff zones disadvantages lower-income shoppers, who often rely on these services because they can’t afford their own cars.
- BJ’s closest-in non-handicap spots are reserved for “parents with infant children”. To be fair, they do have a whole row of handicap spots right next to the building, with sidewalk and road at the same level. Neither of these is anywhere near close to the scooter-cart charging (pick-up/drop-off) area, a parking lot and long entrance corridor away.
- Baby-goods stores have reserved spots for “expecting mothers” and “new mothers”. (This may explain why the drivers of pregnant people feel they are “entitled” to park in handicap spots without handicap plates or hangtags.)
- Some places have reserved spots for veterans, teachers, parents with children, senior citizens, or high-tier loyalty members
- And let’s not forget how stores partition out parking spaces for “customers of Store X only, all others will be towed” when there are no spots (or no empty spots) for Store Y next door on the same stretch of parking lot.
In short, parking has become a battle of “who is the more entitled customer”… and the medically-certified mobility-limited customer (with the handicap tags to prove it) who wants to shop in store seems to be the loser.
