What are they thinking? At the Cherry Creek Shopping Center, they’re charging us now to park.
Nice. Really nice.
“Come on in, throw a few hundred bucks at a new pair of shoes at Nordstrom, drop by the Apple Store for the latest $700 iSomething, go for the gold with a $7,500 bracelet at Tiffany, then celebrate your spending spree with a beautiful bone-in cut of roast prime rib for $57 at the 801 Chophouse.
“And oh, by the way, hand over another few bucks before you drive out. Just for the privilege of having been here.”
I’ve been here before. I don’t mean the mall. I mean the madness of bleeding every last buck out of blue-chip customers just because you can.
It was at Vail, where I ski. Although lift ticket prices back in ancient times weren’t even in the triple digits (whereas a one-day ticket today can cost you $189), the price of parking already was in the double digits and that irritated me because Vail’s message was like the one at today’s Cherry Creek mall: “Come on up, spend lots of money on our slopes and in our stores and eat and drink and be merry and at the end of your deliriously delightful day, shell out even more just to get your car out of hock.”
The town already was making millions from an upscale clientele of tourists and locals, so I wrote a letter complaining about parking prices and explaining that I was protesting the principle, not the payment. Someone tone-deaf wrote back, enclosing a coupon for one day of free parking.
To be fair, the Cherry Creek mall still has free parking — for an hour. After that, though, you now must pay, up to a daily max of $16. True, thatap almost the cheapest deal at the mall, but think about this: it used to be that even with free parking, you couldn’t get out of the mall without dropping a small fortune. Now the fortune’s bigger.
I won’t say the scheme is stupid — the mall’s entitled, itap a business, just like the retail businesses that fill it. But itap off-putting. Annoying. Unfriendly. And tenants in the mall (a few of which pay to validate your parking) seem to agree. One store owner told The Denver Post that his business is so far down since paid parking appeared, it is a “total disaster.” I know someone who recently shopped there, then met friends for dinner, then had to cough up another $10 for parking. No validation. She says she won’t soon go back.
Cherry Creek’s explanation for squeezing a few more bucks out of us is “to make sure customers have the best possible experience. This includes having easy access to parking and entrance to the shopping center.” Only one flaw here: even with the growth of the surrounding neighborhood, we already had easy access. Now what we have is easy costly access. Another friend points out in Cherry Creek’s defense that they’ve “added value” by installing a system of lights that tells you where the next open parking spot is. They should have done that anyway but left it free.
If parking is pivoting from an imperative convenience to an add-on profit center, why should they stop at charging us to park? They could also charge us for other conveniences, like resting our weary bones on their benches and discarding our garbage in their decorative bins. They could install pay toilets — heaven knows shoppers spend enough time in the mall. That would make their coffers flush.
Denver touts Cherry Creek as “the largest concentration of stores between St. Louis and San Francisco.” Thatap why itap usually (although to me, still inexplicably) a top tourist attraction here, which makes it one of the city’s jewels. But if the stores’ revenues drop, quality will follow. The jewel won’t be so shiny. That would be lose-lose. Paid parking isn’t worth it.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit or check out our for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
