Parking Lot Prose: The Median Is the Message

Parking lots probably rank right up there with your local Department of Motor Vehicles office as Places Least Likely to Inspire Great Thoughts. But the good people at Ampco System Parking would like to change that.

Ampco, which operates more than 200 parking lots across Los Angeles and Orange counties, has installed signs atop about half of their ticket-dispensing machines that feature famous quotes and harmless homilies designed to give motorists a little burst of inspiration in surroundings more closely associated with car exhaust and stinky stairwells.

The messages change regularly to include such inspirational nuggets as “A little smile adds a great deal to your face value” and “An alarm clock is a mechanism used to scare the daylights into you.” The 12-member committee that selects the messages favors the light and concise, says Jim Alexander, Ampco’s vice president and regional manager, Southwest region. But occasionally the panel takes a more aggressive approach to the business of being perky: “Do it! Move it! Make it happen! No one ever sat their way to success,” reads one.

Some parking lot managers also pass out candy, coffee, maps, balloons and newspapers in an attempt to make the experience just a little nicer, Alexander says.

“There’s a whole array of stuff we do to improve the parking experience.”