Parking Is No Perk at Mall

Along with festive cheer and good tidings, the holidays mean the return of the annual cat-and-mouse game between employees at South Coast Plaza and the parking lot guards.

Because of the holiday shopping crunch, employees are prohibited from parking in the mall’s lots. Instead, workers are instructed to park about a mile away, and take a shuttle to the Costa Mesa mall.

But some disobedient employees try to sneak in and snatch the mall’s coveted parking spaces.

The problem has gotten so bad that guards set up morning checkpoints at some of the lot entrances and interview incoming drivers.

The savvy security guards--eager to ferret out the parking rascals who pass themselves off as shoppers--look for telltale signs: a lunch box or name tag.

Other guards go undercover to catch the rogues, checking license plates to see if they match any on their database of employee tags. If they find one, they call a tow truck.

“They’re really starting to crack down,” said 20-year-old Tiana Lee, who was riding the shuttle back to work after a lunch break.

Lee, a saleswoman at a clothing store, said she was recently trailed by seven undercover guards when she tried to sneak her car into the jampacked mall lot.

“They scared me to death,” she said. “They look like Secret Service men [in] dark suits and with a wire in their ear.”

Lee got out of the parking jam by pretending to be a new hire, unaware of the strict parking rules.

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Others aren’t as lucky. Tow trucks are a common sight in the busy parking lot, she said.

Brazen employees say they risk towing and the wrath of the guards because off-site parking is so inconvenient and time-consuming. Sometimes taking the shuttle can add half an hour to a workday, Lee said.

“People cheat if they’re running late,” she said.

The guards have no sympathy.

“They just don’t want to do it--they insist on parking here,” said John, a security officer who didn’t want to blow his cover and give his last name. “Our job is to try to catch them. . . . We have ways of knowing--several means of finding” them.

John refused to divulge his methods.

The mall, which gets about 21 million shoppers a year, has parking spaces for about 13,000 vehicles. During the holidays, the mall employs more than 9,000 people, up from about 6,800 the rest of the year.

To prevent chaos in the lots, the mall rents shuttles--custom built for Disneyland--to bring employees back and forth between three off-site lots at Town Center Drive, Harbor Gateway and Whittier Law School. The shuttles run every few minutes from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m.

“We want every space available for our shoppers,” mall spokeswoman Debra Gunn Downing said.

Some employees are exempt: store managers, employees of the month and those who come to shop in their free time.

“The employees are pretty responsible--they understand it’s for customer service,” Downing said, adding that she finds the South Coast Plaza Holiday Parking Program festive.

“We provide coffee and muffins at the stops,” Downing said. “And they’re just darling, those little shuttles.”