A parking spot is a parking spot, right?
Well, not if you frequent, or run a business at, the little strip mall on the corner of Westminster Highway and Minoru Boulevard in Richmond.
If you speak to the customers and the business owners down there, it’s anything but “just a parking spot,” where traffic cones dictate where you can and absolutely cannot park.
From car doors apparently getting kicked at and people getting spat at, to business owners chasing customers of other businesses around the mall, the little corner of Richmond has it all.
Richmond resident Lilian Li said she was shocked when an employee from one of the businesses, Panago Pizza, dashed out and started kicking the door of her car parked outside the shop.
“We were going to buy pizza but were sitting in the car first for less than a minute,” Li told the Richmond News, who shared her experience on Chinese-language social media platform Little Red Book.
“A Panago employee ran to my car and kicked my car door like crazy. She also spat and yelled at me and my mom when we opened the door. We were both shocked.”
Kicking, spitting never happened: Panago owner
The incident was denied by Andus Lau, owner of the Panago store, who said it “never happened.”
“If that did happen, they should call the police. Do they have a police file?” Lau told the News, adding there isn't enough information available to be able to check the store’s CCTV.
A few others shared similar experiences on the store’s Google Review – when they stopped at Panago’s parking lot temporarily for emergencies, claiming they were told off by an angry employee from the shop.
Lau also denied the accusations but admitted there have been “parking issues” at the mall.
“We rent where we paid for and you can see this line, it has ‘Panago Pizza’ on it,” said Lau.
“I’m not trying to defend or whatever but if you park at the wrong spot and we tell you to move, if you don’t move, five minutes, five minutes, every day, what do you think? How do you feel?
“We will ask them to go…I’m not here for fighting.”
Conflicts over parking common in the mall
Shop owners at the strip mall said they didn’t witness the incident Li claimed, but have seen conflicts over customers parking at the wrong spots in the strip mall over the past years.
And this has become more common in the past two years following the arrival of Tasty BBQ & Beer Bar, a popular barbecue and grill restaurant.
“This is a very common thing here. At first, we were angry, but now we are used to it,” said a member of staff at Tasty BBQ & Beer Bar, who asked to remain anonymous.
“If someone parked at the Panago parking spot, despite being our customers or not, an employee from the store would go to knock on their windscreen, yell at them, or follow them to the store they visited and ask them to move the car,” she said.
She told the News once, the Panago employee wrote down the plate number of a car parked at its spot, came into their restaurant and showed the note to every customer “almost to their face.”
Another time the employee banged on Tasty BBQ & Beer Bar’s window before yelling at them to remove a car.
Flaman Fitness at the mall also had customers that were followed by a Panago employee into its shop and asked to remove their car.
In a video he showed to the News, the employee stood close to the customer, who was paying her bill at the counter, and asked her to remove her car right away.
“She was very aggressive… literally in her face. It’s really shocking,” said Mike Logan, the store manager.
“[The customer] told me later, ‘I was going to buy a pizza after I came to your store, and that’s why I parked in her spot, but she didn’t give me a second to explain myself.’”
Frustration over parking
Some store owners said, however, they share Panago’s frustration over parking.
In a small strip mall with limited parking, parking lots get filled up quickly during lunch and dinner time and many customers end up parking on other businesses’ spots.
“I can’t speak for Panago but in our case, we are the one that’s often attacked by the customers,” said the owner of 4 Stones Vegetarian Cuisine, a restaurant next to Tasty BBQ & Beer Bar.
“Many customers are unreasonable. They park at our spot and go somewhere else, and when we asked them to move, some of them gave a very bad attitude.”
Being fed up with arguing with and chasing customers, they put a cone at two of their five designated parking lots and only removed them when the driver confirmed them to be their customers.
“Even so, some customers would push our cone away and forcefully park there. Some even parked in front of our fire exit at the back,” she said, adding that a tow truck can take a day to come so is not really helpful.
The owner of Tokyo Allure Hair Studio said she also has her parking spots taken by other customers, often from Tasty BBQ & Beer Bar, and needs to ask the restaurant to address it, but sometimes "they are busy so they don't really help us."
But because the studio closes during dinner time, it’s less impacted than restaurants like Panago.
Logan, who has a sign outside his store reminding customers from Tasty BBQ & Beer Bar to not park there during their business hours, said he understands that Panago employees can get frustrated over parking but he is sad to see things developing this way.
“They don’t have enough slots and everybody’s trying to park in their spots, which I understand is difficult,” added Logan.
“They did everything they can and it’s been going on like this for 10 year, and COVID put more pressure on everybody.
“But they gotta calm down.”
