Glasgow’s parking lot thugs get entrepreneurial

There are any number of apocryphal tales along the following lines:<p>One day the parking attendant at a local shopping centre doesn't turn up for work, after fifteen years of faithful service without a single day off. The centre manager calls the local council, asking if they're sending someone to cover for him. The council have no idea who he is. After some investigation, it transpired that both the shopping centre management and the council assumed that the car park belonged to the other party. When the shopping centre was being built, the car park was finished before anything else. The bloke had just stood at the entrance with a yellow jacket and a sign and started collecting money. He did this so diligently that no-one ever had cause to notice him. He wasn't off sick, he had fled the country - £3 a car for 15 years worked out to £1.5 million.

This is not thuggish but I figure I share it here anyway since it s pretty entrepreneurial: A long time ago I was a housekeeper in Yosemite National Park. When I wasn't working, I d roam around the valley, checking out its nooks and crannies. One day I decided to hike up Yosemite Falls. For those of you who dont know about the fall, it is only 7 miles round trip but the elevation is a steep 3650ft. This means lots and lots of brutal switchbacks under the intense summer heat. Many tourists overlooked that (or they didn't know how to read a topo map) and didn't bring any food or water, thinking it was just an easy stroll in the park. When they reached the top, exhausted and dehydrated, welcoming them there would be a man filtering water from the creek with his pump and selling it for a dollar a pop. So there it was, a line of out of shape, thirsty hikers, buying ice cold water from a man under the shade, with the gorgeous Sierra Nevada as a backdrop.

This is one of the reasons why parking inspectors here in Vancouver shoot car's dashboard with 5MP camera prior to issuing a ticket. That's not say there are many parking places left that do not require entering a parking spot number when buying a ticket, or binding a ticket to a specific car in some way.

A friend of mine was scammed at a private pay lot. A parking thug was posing as the attendant and took his money. He comes back some time later and finds his pickup truck booted. The PITA thing about this, is that the private lot has no incentive to prevent this sort of scam, so long as it's not prevalent enough to scare people away from lots in general. In fact, there are parties involved who would benefit by <i>encouraging</i> this scam.

It's quite often the case that the dark side of things is where a lot of innovation comes from, whether it's criminals, porn kings, pirates etc.

I haven't seen a parking ticket machine that doesn't require you to input (and then prints on the ticket) the numerical portion of your car reg for some years in England.

Homeless people in Miama have been following a similar scheme for a while now, albeit less scary and more annoying. Of course, now the city is beginning to replace the machines that print tickets, with those that electronically keep track of funds, the homeless people disappear and the city increases their income by forcing people to pay for a spot which a previous car had payed for.

Stealing from community/government coffers is not entrepreneurial. Just because a tax-evasion scheme is clever, that doesn't make it entrepreneurial.

Mafia thugs in Italy have been doing this for years.

The same scheme has been run in Manchester (England) at the Victoria Station car park for as long as I can remember. Luckily my Italian accent and angry face is enough to keep thugs at bay, but I bet they're tolerated by local police as long as they don't threaten the locals too much.<p>In order to fight the scam, ticket machines now print your plate number on the ticket itself, so if you buy one from the thugs, you are risking a fine. The fact people keep doing it shows very clearly how parking charges in central Manchester are unrealistically high.

One thing about being an American living in another country has made me realize about the USA is that there are tons of police compared to other countries. This is a good and bad thing. It's a bad thing when you're being pulled over and harassed for looking suspicious. It's a good thing when you have bullies like this. If you call the police, they will usually respond promptly and eagerly looking to make an arrest.

Concealed carry in the US is an awesome thing.

-1 point for the following assumptions...<p>a: if they weren't doing this, they'd be dealing drugs.<p>b: dealing drugs is the worst of all possible activities.<p>Interesting scam none the less though.