Something has been bugging me for a very long time. How long it has been bugging me is what I do not know. I want to say it started in the Fall of 2007 when I started back to school. Every Fall semester since then, there’s always been an article in the school newspaper about the amount of parking spaces available. There should be a parking garage built, they exclaim! The “close” parking spaces fill up around 9am by all the early morning commuters, present company included. There are three very large parking lots for premium parking. These are for those that don’t want to park at the football stadium and ride the bus to class. The two closest lots fill up fast. However, the third sits almost empty everyday. Why? Because it’s a couple blocks over from where people want to be.
The same thing happens at work. “Oh we need a parking garage because there’s not enough parking spaces!” Actually there are more than necessary if you’d take a second to go look.
So I came up with this theory: People’s laziness can be directly linked to the amount of time they will spend driving around a parking lot looking for a spot close to the entrance.
Too many times I’ve seen people driving around a parking lot for 10 minutes hoping a spot opens up really, really close. Why not go to an area you know there will be open spots and park there? The ten minutes you just wasted, you could have spent 5 walking to the door and saved the other 5 minutes. Oh wait! That makes too much sense, doesn’t it? So why do you drive around and around instead of parking in the first spot you see available? It’s because you are LAZY!!
The other day upon departing Wal-Mart as I was heading toward my car I saw an SUV following me so that they could get my parking spot when I left since I had parked on the side of the building, fairly close. (Here’s a tip: Park on the side of the building. There’s usually almost always a spot open.) So this SUV goes down to the end of the row and makes a u-turn to wait on me to leave. In the process of heading back my way, they passed an OPEN parking spot about 10 spots down from me. That’s right, roughly 20-30 yards away from me. (Another tip: don’t wait on me to take my parking spot. I will intentionally go as slow as possible due to this theory of mine.) Lucky for this person that I didn’t take very long as it was a bit cold. But I did take my time walking the cart back to the ‘Cart Corral’. Total time wasted for this person had to be at least 5 minutes. These fools could have parked 10 spots away and already been shopping. But no. Let’s waste our time and our gas.
Makes sense to me!