Free Parking!

Shops aren’t obliged to follow through on badly-worded offers. But apparently, car parks are! (This does not count as legal advice…)

Parking is difficult near our local doctors’ surgery, and we’ve had to go there fairly often over the last few years what with one thing and another.

I maybe qualify as disabled, but I certainly don’t think I need, or should be allowed to get, a blue disabled parking badge.

Thankfully, there is a KFC over the road from the surgery, and they have autism-friendly parking. I don’t think they mean to, but they do.

As many car parks do, the KFC car park has a metal sign with terms and conditions, which states clearly:

90 MINUTES
MAXIMUM STAY
FOR KFC CUSTOMERS ONLY

A clear reading of that is that the 90 minute maximum stay period only applies to KFC customers; anyone else is welcome to stay as long as they want to. It seems an odd stipulation – I can understand it on health grounds and wanting their car park to have a slightly better class of customer, except that doesn’t really make sense because the car park is owned or leased by KFC, and because it’s apparently often used for drug deals anyway; I’m not clear if the drug dealers pick up some fried chicken while there.

Incidentally, I’ve checked with the Aldi just down the road, and their signs don’t have the word “for”, so it sounds more like a series of unpunctuated imperatives. I think Aldi also have a clause further down about only parking there while in the shop, rather than being a general car park for use by anyone who shops there occasionally and happens to be passing. [Incidentally, that’s what our church car park rules are – we know that some church members use it as a park and ride for the city if they are going shopping, and that’s fine. We don’t have a sign.]

Sometimes people ask me if I make an effort to read signs like this in ways that the writers (probably) didn’t intend. The answer is “no”. I see the signs, and it’s always a bit of an effort to parse the words and work out what they mean, just as it is with everything.

But in this case, that’s the meaning I got to first. Maybe there’s a stage that takes place in other people’s heads that doesn’t happen in mine, where they infer from the context what they think the sign means, and then take that as the actual meaning.

If KFC meant something different, they should have said it, like Aldi did.