sashinka | observation orientated, with a twist of lime | a blog

Park At Your Peril
I pride myself on parking in the parents-with-children spaces at Tesco. It’s not that I’m stridently single, it’s just that I resent paying over the odds for my tiny no-mates portions of everything, and think it’s payback time.

So I definitely park in the kids’ spaces at night. For a start, children should be tucked up tight, and I don’t see why I should park in zone 127 just on the off-chance that some boundary-free parent will take their kids on an adventure well past the watershed.

Last week, I was doing some high-speed shoppage on my way out for the evening. Nine-ish, in a hurry, I parked near the store in one of those hallowed spaces. I hadn’t even got out of my car when a North London mother-type (all 4X4, big hair and designer tracksuit) parked across me, rolled down her window and said “what you doing parking there?” She had the proof – babyseats – but no actual children. And I had no desire to get into a slanging match with someone who clearly had a better manicurist than me, so I just stared her down and she buggered off. But I did feel like she’d yelled “can’t get a boyfriend? I can hear your bodyclock ticking” across the whole fucking car park.

While we’re settling the balance, why don’t all the Tesco reward points get redistributed to the single people? Parents have the reward of child-rearing, after all.

And there’s another thing: there’s every chance that yuppie-single types (God how nineties, I know) are more likely to go for the premium products; I’m a Tesco’s Finest gal through and through. Though they do over-egg the packaging; I just don’t need metallic print to feel loved and adored by my multiple food retailer.

Once, in a fit of pique over teeth-gnashingly poor service at Brent Cross Tesco (as I remember it, it was the Wasp In Bag of Salad incident) I performed my lifetime customer value manoeuvre on some poor be-name-tagged sod who happened to be working the late shift and wasn’t sufficiently apologetic about my buzzing salad.

It goes like this. You get out your bill: I paid £40 for my groceries tonight. Say I spend that every week; that’s around £2,000 a year. Say I’ve got fifty shopping years, total, in my life. That’s a hundred thousand pounds, near enough. For potentially losing a hundred thousand pound customer, I think you should give me more than 79p. Don’t you?

As I remember it, my customer service representative was non-plussed and said I should write to head-office. But for a hundred thousand pounds, I think I’m parking where the hell I want.

And, like, surely if I’m a largely premium product customer, I should get premium parking. Closer to the store. Make the Tesco’s Value purchasers park the five-mile hike. In fact, in a product-differentiated world, there should be three parking sections: premium, near the store and with nice blokes to bring you a trolley that doesn’t squeak; regular, and Value, where the broken-anyway trolleys are painted prison-uniform blue stripes to indicate that you buy cheap food.

Mothers might moan about being time-poor and cash-strapped and at the end of their tether, but many of them have someone to help them carry the shopping. Either a child – I never said I didn’t believe in child labour – or their other half. Ergo, they should be the people parking in Outer Mongolia. I don’t see why I should park a short hike from the store when I’ve got no-one to help me unload. And that’s not just emotionally. And anyway, now that the shelves display cost per hundred grammes or whatever, I know that my bijoux-portion purchases are subsidising all the families of five, anyhow. They should pay me. QED.