SHUT UPPP

There are a lot of things I really love about our neighborhood grocery store. I'm usually there during the day, so it's mostly empty, the daytime employees are all "adults" and not high schoolers who are annoyed that they are spending the only free five hours of their day at a job where they have to deal with old people like me buying large amounts of wine and tabloid magazines to spend their Friday evenings with (suck on that, teenagers!), they have a lot of local products, and this particular HEB has the nicest freaking people you've ever met in your life (except the high schoolers). My beef with them, though, is the good two dozen or so prime parking spots they've got out front that are designated "CUSTOMER WITH CHILD PARKING". WTF?!

Now, I get that it's really not that big of a deal - I mean, walking an extra thirty yards or whatever isn't going to kill me - but c'mon, HEB, what the heck? Do you need that many parking places for your beloved yuppie-plus-spawn combos? I have zero problem with the pregnant-lady parking outside Babies R Us, or the "parent-with-sick-kid" parking outside the pharmacy. I honestly wouldn't even mind if there were maybe only eight or ten of these "customer with child parking" spots, but after you factor in the handicapped places and the cart return slots which are both completely valid and necessary, there's not a whole lot of room for the rest of us. The reason it bugs me so much, though, is for days like today, when I go to do my grocery shopping in the middle of the day and maybe only half the CWCP spots are taken but most of the parking places just beyond them are taken, because most people who are doing their grocery shopping at that hour don't have children with them. This way, I get to either stalk somebody through a partially-empty parking lot to their non-CWCP place and then wait for them to load up their car so I can take their spot, or I can park at the Starbucks down the shopping center and walk. At least that way I get to have tea.

I've considered just saying "screw it" and parking there anyway, especially if I'm there after 10:00 pm because then at least I can come back with a "Your kid should be at home in bed" response if anybody says anything, but I don't want to have a fight in a parking lot (not after the Little HEB Smackdown of '05, at least). Plus if I got banned from that HEB I'd have to go to the one by my parents' house, which increases the chance of seeing someone I knew in high school (RUN AWAY!) and that's not fun for anybody. This also makes a pretty obvious (and obnoxious) social statement, but that's another post for another day. Maybe next time I'll get brave and just take one of those spots. After all, it says "CUSTOMER WITH CHILD PARKING" but it doesn't say "ONLY."