Beware ALDI parking fines!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

tonypop

Just tell Aldi and their outsourced company to eff off!!!:mad:

1-0totheArsenal

wipe ya ar*e on the fine and send it back. tell them you send me shi*e and i'll send you sh*te back.:D

Jaffa.

Well, you wont be shopping at Aldi again, will you?

oldone_2

vikingaero wrote: »

At the closest Aldi to me, in Gillingham the Aldi is about a one minute walk from the rail station. If all the train commuters decided to flood the car park then there would be chaos for legitimate shoppers. All that would happen is the return of clampers and tow trucks.

It is of course reasonable for Aldi to want to save these spaces for their shoppers. However where they go wrong is in the enforcement, which of course they have every right to do.

The easy answer is to employ a couple of people to patrol the car park, guiding and advising motorists. If they see a commuter parking, a note on their windscreen asking them not to do it is a good initial response. Numbers would be put on a data base. If found to park again, the car number, colour and make would be flagged up, and staff would prevent it entering the car park .(commuters tend to keep regular hours)

Of course this would mean employing extra people, but that is not a bad thing in the current climate.

hollydays

But since when have you seen a car park attendant with a database to hand?

nexuss

oldone wrote: »

and staff would prevent it entering the car park .(commuters tend to keep regular hours)

Of course this would mean employing extra people, but that is not a bad thing in the current climate.

Form a human chain across the entrance ? :rotfl:

olly300

yorksrabbit wrote: »

Simplest way of deterring non-shoppers from selfishly hogging parking spaces intended for genuine shoppers would be to levy refundable charges for every car park user -- it's a fairly common practice in parts of the USA where the local climate is a darn sight hotter than the UK's. However. . .

1) Pay & Display is all well and good if there are many pay stations rather than a few and:

2) Pay & Display is fine when the weather's fine but otherwise the idea of getting drenched in going from the car to a pay station, queuing for a ticket, returning to the car, and only then being able to enter the store is anything but appealing.

It's largely for that reason that stores in the UK which tested out Pay, Display & Refund parking found it expensive to operate (a heck of a lot of pay stations are needed to make them convenient for everyone) and customer unfriendly (the shopping experience is intended to be pleasurable, not a rain-drenched ordeal.)

It was also found that dealing with parking slips at check-out (deducting the parking cost from the bill) was time consuming and occasionally not even workable due to technical glitches.

The upshot is that stores who did test the pay-display-refund concept (we know of three supermarket chains who trialled it around 10 years ago) abandoned the idea primarily to protect store-customer relations, deciding instead absent themselves entirely from the parking aspect either by contracting out to a 'car park patrol' in a free-to-use car park or by running a Pay & Display with the first hour, or half hour, free -- though again, with a contractor handling abuses of the system so as to keep the store itself well clear of any dispute.

Sadly, it's still not satisfactory: there are always going to be people selfish enough to 'steal' parking places to which they have no entitlement, whilst the "parking fines" issued on behalf of any store are utterly meaningless.

For the foreseeable future then, unenforcable parking "fines" are going to continue to distress the unwary whilst being laughed at by those who couldn't care less. As to the notion of getting a store manager involved in a parking issue, that misunderstands the whole point of the arrangement: the store manager can't be involved because the store isn't involved; any dispute is with the parking contractor, and the store is very happy for it to be that way.

Actually they haven't all abandoned it. Some London located supermarkets still use it.

However as they are more inner city than where I live I don't tend to use them on a regular basis.

The supermarkets I do use clearly state the time limit you can use the car park for and this varies from 2 hours to 5 hours before you will get a fine.

There are also supermarkets near me, due to the fact they share their car park with other shops and facilities, do pay and display and don't refund you. This is annoying as you don't know whether you are going to be shopping for 30 minutes or over an hour.

juliescot

hollydays wrote: »

But since when have you seen a car park attendant with a database to hand?

Perhaps not currently but incredibly easy to organise.
A sheet of paper with reg numbers is a cheap way of doing it for starters.

hollydays

juliescot wrote: »

Perhaps not currently but incredibly easy to organise.
A sheet of paper with reg numbers is a cheap way of doing it for starters.

Thats surreal...:rotfl:

juliescot

hollydays wrote: »

Thats surreal...:rotfl:

Is it?

How so?