Treading Upon Another Option

We went to this restaurant for brunch last Sunday that sits atop a hill and had no streets nearby on which to park. But it has an enormous parking lot for its guests. We’ve been there before, perhaps a half-dozen times, and there was never any problem with parking. But last Sunday, access to the parking lot was blocked off, and we were forced to go through a valet parking service line.

The parking lot was virtually empty at the time, and when I started to pull through, a young man in an ill-fitting ersatz tuxedo stepped in front of the car waving a parking ticket.

“We’ll take it from here,” he said.

I asked him why, since there was plenty of room in the lot and we were quite capable of walking the few steps to the restaurant door. He shrugged and said that had been the rule for two months.

In this situation, a customer has three choices: If he is irritated enough, he can leave the restaurant; if he’s angry enough, he can drive through the roadblock and make a scene; or he can throw it in, take the parking check, and figure the system has done him in once again.

Since we had people waiting for us inside, the first option was not feasible. The second would have caused a confrontation with the young man who is parking the cars, and he’s the wrong one to confront since he doesn’t set policy. He’s just trying to pick up a buck or two at what is probably a not very satisfying job since he has to deal with hotheads like me. That’s what I hate about situations like this: the person responsible is seldom out front taking the heat.

So I accepted the claim check, gave up the car and went inside sufficiently steamed to ask for the manager. He wasn’t there or he was hiding out, so I talked to an underling who seemed mildly incredulous at my complaint.

“We’re providing our customers a service,” he said, as if that closed the issue.

“What if your customers don’t want the service and resent having to pay for it?” I asked him. He shrugged and said no one else had complained, and besides the service was free--which was technically true if you don’t tip the parker, which leaves you feeling worse than knowing you knuckled under to the system.

So I glowered through the first part of my meal and then put it aside.

Because they have a low priority in your life--what with wars in Saudi Arabia and the Angels on the skids--you tend to forget these incidents until the same thing happens again. My problem is that it happened to me again the next day.

This time it was at a restaurant in Corona del Mar that I frequent for lunch. I had been there just last week. No problem parking. The restaurant has a lot, and if that’s full, there are places on the street or in a city lot just below the restaurant.

Once again, the lot was about two-thirds empty, and I came in a back way with which I was familiar and parked. And damned if one of these tuxedoed people didn’t come trotting up to my car waving a parking ticket. Seems that I had inadvertently circumvented the system.

I had approximately the same conversation with him I’d had during the brunch incident except that this place had switched to valet parking just the day before. This time I chose a different option. I left. I had a lousy lunch somewhere else and felt more foolish than full of virtue for standing on what is probably a dubious principle at best.

But this valet parking thing punches one of my most volatile buttons, the one that resists to absurd degrees being force-fed services that I don’t want. And especially services that are pretentious, elitist and for the most part unnecessary.

It may be my fevered imagination, but it seems to me that more and more establishments that serve the public in this specially anointed county of ours are turning to valet parking. A half-dozen restaurants with which I’ve been familiar over the years have taken this up in the last few months. The tuxedo market must be booming.

Valet parking, in my opinion, is quite useful and even imperative under certain circumstances: for large public events where there is no parking nearby or splendid parties (like the Academy Awards) where the guests are decked out and don’t want to trudge from a parking lot. Under such circumstances, no other option is viable.

But most of the time, valet parking should be optional. It should be offered up for the infirm, the rich and the lazy to use as they see fit. And it should be left up to the rest of us to make whatever arrangements we like. If the valet parkers have blocked off all the close-to-home spaces and we have to walk through a half-mile of parking lot, that, at least, is our choice. We may grumble about it, but it’s a different order of grumble than being required to do something we think is silly.

I thought about this during the lousy lunch I had because I made a statement at one of my favorite restaurants. It isn’t that I begrudge the buck I slip to the valet parker, who is just a working stiff like me. It’s just that I think an integral part of the American psyche is bound up in that flag the Colonials once carried into the American Revolution that read, “Don’t Tread On Me.”

That admonition is in our blood, and we now find ourselves in a society in which a great many things are required of us, some that make sense and some that don’t. Our options are being reduced daily. I think that’s why when our options are removed from something as innocuous as valet parking, we resist--because it’s something we still can resist.

I suppose that kid at the brunch place told his buddies to watch out for this white-haired dude who gave him a bad time going in. Well, I tipped him $2 going out. I wasn’t going to carry that guilt around all day.