December 17, 2007
Burger me
Jamie Thomson has been fined for taking too long to leave a McDonald’s car park because he was lingering over his meal. He tells his story here; the Guardian news story is here, a ludicrously solemn Guardian editorial is here. Obviously this is bad PR for McDonald’s, but when did McDonald’s ever get good PR in the pages of the Guardian?
Still, I hope the Guardian gets its way and McDonald’s allows customers to park indefinitely for the price of a donut. It would be a lot cheaper than parking at a regular place, as long as you didn’t have to prove that you ate the donut.
I think McD has a right to charge for parking. It is not a parking lot; it is a convenience to enable customers. McD may get the PR, good or bad, but many others do this to ‘customers’ too. Sainsbury’s and Waitrose have limits on how long you can park in their car parks. In SE London, one of the Sainsbury’s car parks inadvertently serves as an overflow car park from a nearby hospital and now people have to pay to park in Sainsbury’s.
BTW what _was_ your point as an economist, on this matter?
Posted by: Shefaly | December 17th, 2007 at 11:13 am | Report this commentThe thing that worries me about this is how MacDonalds gets its information on registered owners of cars. Surely the DVLA should not be able to pass this information on to commercial organisations.
It is not too difficult to see how this data can be misused to monitor people’s movements and ,say, identify when they are not at home and how long it will be before they could return.
Posted by: Paul | December 17th, 2007 at 1:00 pm | Report this commentHis point as very simple, perverse incentives create strange effects - he was hoping for cheap parking though a change of policy
Posted by: Gerry | December 17th, 2007 at 6:51 pm | Report this commentPerverse incentives also occur in the case of coffee shops that offer free wireless internet access to customers. Each may buy a cup of coffee and occupy a seat that is no longer available to another paying customer. The seat becomes a low cost addition to home or commercial office space.
Will such arrangements allow these shops to survive? So far, in my neighbourhood they seem to be surviving.
Posted by: Christopher Maule | December 30th, 2007 at 3:21 pm | Report this comment