This has to do with my blog on the parking business model, a couple of posts back.:
I agree with you! Very seldom do I go to park somewhere and it is full. And if it is full I would just move on to the next closest location. I will remember getting shut out of a location and will not go back there as my first choice next time ("If you do not learn from history you are doomed to repeat it" syndrome).
In today’s busy schedule who has time to look on line to reserve a parking spot. I for one don’t! This is just another example of an available technology and people tying to take advantage of it. The technology is driving the market instead of the market driving the technology.
Posted by: Parking Lifer | May 3, 2005 11:17 AM
Its the case with parking reservations (with the couple of exceptions I mentioned below). The ‘net allows us to do it, so we do.
I hear now that there is a severe syndrome akin to carpel tunnel that is hitting folks with Blackberries (or now called Crackberries due to their addictiveness.) It affects the thumbs. My wife gets email during dinner, while working in the garden, all the time.
Shut it off! you say. They can’t. Its worse than Crack. At least sometime you run out of the drug and have to go looking for it. The Blackberry is there no matter what.
Of course my wife, who is head of a major department for the American Red Cross, is on call 24/7. She says the Crackberry is better since she can tell if its an emergency or not before she responds. That may be true for her in her position, but I doubt if my other Berry addict friend from Canada could say the same about his constant attachment to his little device during his vacation.
Lets face it, do we really REALLY have to get our email while we are at the barbers (or in my case, hair stylist), or talk to our friends while we are shopping at the supermarket. Its not that we need to, its that since the technology is there, we will use it.
I was in line to pay for my car wash and the guy three people behind me was holding forth on his cell phone. The rest of us were considering a lynching. Don’t people know that these things work just as well if you talk in a normal tone?
You get the point. Technology push instead of market pull.
I had a friend that told me once about his adamant opposition to the billion dollar subway being built in LA. After he railed on it for a while he mentioned that he would probably be saying how great it was five years after it opened…That’s me when I make my parking reservation in five years. Because I can.
Whoops, gotta run, my cell is ringing and I left it down the hall….
JVH
