Established 1776

With your help, we can raise $1,000,000 of awareness.

A Tale Of Two Mall Parkers

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

People who park as close as possible to the mall

People who park as far as possible from the mall

IMG_0513

Something that’s always struck me as worth investigating are the cars that are parked as far as possible from the mall, but equally curious are the people who will drive around for 20 minutes looking for a “close” parking space, bypassing dozens of perfectly viable middle-distance spaces. I don’t know if these people are expecting to have to get a rabid raccoon from Nordstrom to their car, but the quest for close parking is a serious one.

I conducted a small survey of the people in the room I’m in to better understand the people who are near and far parkers. I am the only one in the room. Here are my results.

distance-vs-sex
Women circle for parking spots like vultures. Men typically don’t give a shit. There’s that one guy with his midlife crisis car who parks far away from the mall. Then there are a few women who park far away “for exercise”.

distance-vs-age
At a young age, respondents have nothing better to do with their time than find excellent parking. Up until age 30 or so, the ritual of pointing out where you’ve parked to people you’re meeting at the mall or a restaurant is still very active. In midlife, people are too busy to worry about where they’re going to park or whether or not they should wear a dress shirt with baby spit on it. In the coveted elder years, blue parking passes are issued, opening the gates to the most coveted of parking real estate: handicap spots.

Interestingly, all women still parked as close as possible (barring “exercise”), regardless of the age, but did not participate in the “look at my parking space” ritual as often as men.

distance-vs-fear
Now, looking at distance vs. fear (nearly all respondents who feared door dings also feared black people, and notably feared Democrats, as well), we see an interesting trend. People who have little fear tend to park in whatever spaces they happen upon, while those with a healthy amount of fear must choose whether they are more fearful of door dings or black people, either parking close to minimize the number of broken radiators and diapers for a baby girl they are asked to finance, or parking far away to avoid unsightly door dings but expose themselves to solicitation. High-end malls have combated this stressor with valet parking.

Indeed, the study of mall parking is an interesting one. Please feel free to leave comments with other valid bits of data I may have neglected.

Share with other people:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • del.icio.us
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Sphinn
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

October 9, 2008 | Filed Under in cars 

comments

Leave a Reply




  • subscribe to this blog



     Subscribe to RSS

    Subscribe with Bloglines

    Add to Google

    Add to Technorati Favorites

    why you are here...

    You are here because you are awesome and you celebrate awesomeness.

    You are here to read a new post every weekday.

    You are here because there are two types of people in the world: people who are here, and people who suck.