Welcome to the Costco parking lot wars. It’s 'Survivor’ with cars - USA Today

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What is this?’ ” He’s not joking. Once a week, Hall piles his three kids in the car, drives five minutes to Costco and turns into the second row of the parking lot. If he doesn’t immediately find a spot, he drives out to the boonies, stows his two youngest in the shopping cart, and then he and the 7-year-old hoof it, bypassing long lines of exasperated drivers. “People will walk three miles inside of this big ... store but they have to park on the front step,” Hall told USA TODAY. “They could just park in the back of the parking lot but no, they have to get their Toyota Tundra in that parking spot currently held by a little Prius just so they don’t have to walk farther.” Costco's bad parking karmaIt’s one of the fundamental truths about the world’s most popular warehouse chain. People love Costco but they don’t love parking at Costco.  While some parking lots are roomy, others can easily get overcrowded, often because the warehouses have become too popular for their footprint, share parking with other retail establishments or are older and poorly designed, parking engineers say.  But Costco isn’t to blame for all the parking headaches. Bad behavior is responsible for many of those. Just ask the internet. Especially in congested urban areas, the Costco parking lot is like an audition for “Survivor,” where no trick or tactic is too outlandish to snag a prime parking spot.  Tailgating shoppers back to their cars, then blocking the aisle and forcing everyone else to wait, too; gaming the system by having a passenger hop out and run over to stand in a parking spot to “reserve” it; parking illegally in spots for tire inflation or tire service. One couple has racked up millions of views for their trailblazing short cut into the Costco parking lot, bypassing the entrance and four-wheeling over the curb and sidewalk, sometimes cutting off drivers about to pull into the vacant spot. Then there are those who hog multiple spots despite Costco’s generously apportioned parking spaces. One shopper even brought their own traffic cone to straddle two spots.  Controversial habits don’t end when shoppers exit their vehicles. They abandon their carts in parking spaces, not cart corrals, making it harder for other people to park or even open their car doors.  In fact, Costco parking lots have such a bad rap, they even made a TikTok list of the “most evil places on earth:” “Every Costco parking lot is built on a fault line where the demons crawl up from hell and possess the drivers into acting like they have never driven a vehicle ever before.”  While the internet spotlights the rare act of kindness – like the time a stranger stopped to help an Air Force veteran and mother of two struggling to load her massive Costco haul into her truck – video after video shows grown adults throwing toddler-like tantrums. Rude behavior in Costco parking lots came as a surprise to Hope Maria, who hails from a rural town in Idaho the size of a postage stamp that didn’t have a Costco. The first time Maria shopped at Costco was when she and her husband moved to the Bay Area, where short fuses and long waits are all too common in the parking lot. A year ago, a driver screamed at her. "I thought he wanted my spot so I was trying to back out of my spot and he got so angry like I was gonna hit him when I wasn't," Maria said. “Especially in California, we just park as far away as we can. We're like, ‘we don't want to get mad today.’” Even the smallest infraction – taking too long to leave a spot or leaning on the horn to hurry things along – can ignite tempers. One TikToker refused to give up her parking spot and instead savored her food-court hot dog to get back at a cranky driver who honked at her. While viral videos poke fun, territorial scrums over scarce Costco spots can turn ugly, and sometimes violent. In Danville, California, fisticuffs over a parking space landed one man in the hospital. In another heated dispute at a Costco in British Columbia, a woman brandished a machete. The corporate honchos at Costco know all this bad parking karma can curb enthusiasm for shopping there. It has even come up at shareholder meetings. From Taiwanese moon cakes and Korean kimbap to pupusas and birria tacos, Christine Ma-Kellams used to delight in shopping Costco’s diverse food selection for her household of four. Then she got fed up with trying to park at the busy Torrance, California, warehouse. After two decades of fealty, Ma-Kellams told USA TODAY she will only brave Costco “once in a blue moon” because the parking lot is a “hot mess.” “It’s not just that there's never any parking, but people park illegally all the time on the paved road leading into the parking lot. So it just makes it a real nightmare to get around because, not only are you waiting for a spot, but the road is congested with cars that are not supposed to be parked there,” she said. “Most days, most weeks, if I can go anywhere else, I go somewhere else.” So Costco is funneling resources into relieving parking pain points, buying up nearby land or building upper-level parking and moving space-constrained warehouses to roomier locations.  It’s also adding new warehouses in some places “to provide a better member experience and drive more volumes in these warehouses,” CEO Ron Vachris told investors on the company’s third-quarter earnings call in May.  David Schwegel has written articles about Costco parking for the Institute of Transportation Engineers, comparing Costco’s old-fashioned parking lot design, where the goal was to maximize the number of spots, to the more modern version where the goal is smooth circulation.  The single-row drive aisles at the older warehouses gave some motorists “a sense of taking their lives into their own hands,” he said.  Newer Costcos, like the one he patronizes in Loomis, California, have parking-friendly designs with 90-degree-angled spaces that maximize vehicle capacity and enable two-way traffic flow, making it far easier to find an accessible spot, Schwegel said. “Costco has been working hard to make parking a more pleasant experience,” he said.  While it may seem like a pedestrian issue, parking is one of the great modern frustrations, researchers say. Think George Costanza and his Seinfeldian scuffles over parking spots. Many Americans expect parking to be “convenient, available and free,” but the reality is often quite different, according to Henry Grabar’s “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.”  His book highlights a Park City, Utah, man who calls 911 when he can’t find a spot, a priest who assaulted a New York City traffic officer and a Boston woman who complained she lost 11 pounds because she was too nervous to give up her parking space to go grocery shopping. “Parking-driven psychosis is a regular feature of American life,” Grabar wrote, reeling off a lengthy list of parking space disputes that turned deadly just in the span of one year. The American fixation on parking is only natural, according to Grabar. People’s fears rise anytime “parking comes under threat.” After all, without a place to park, you can never get out of the car.  “A parking space is nothing less than the link between driving and life itself, the nine-by-eighteen-foot portal beyond which lies whatever you got in the car to do in the first place,” Grabar observed. “Whoever said life was about the journey and not the destination clearly never had to look for a place to park.” But why do we obsess so much over parking at Costco? Andrew Velkey, director of the neuroscience program at Christopher Newport University, has a theory.  Competitive parking at Costco is an extension of the treasure-hunt mentality that consumes shoppers inside the warehouse, he says. Nabbing that coveted parking space activates the mesolimbic reward system in the brain that doles out dopamine. “People will then overestimate the likelihood they're going to get a good parking spot, and then they'll devote too much time trying to get one,” he said.  When Velkey studied human behavior in parking lots at Walmart and elsewhere, he discovered that drivers who try to get a spot close to the entrance usually don’t save any more time in the long run than if they parked farther away. And he took that lesson to heart. Velkey says he’s a “peripheral” parker. When he pulls into the parking lot of the Costco in Newport News, Virginia, he grabs the first empty spot he sees. JP Mark, an adjunct professor of finance at Golden Gate University in San Francisco who lives in a remote area near Lake Tahoe, has some pro tips that he has honed over the 27 years he’s been a Costco member. He does not follow people back to their cars, roll down his window and ask random shoppers if they parked nearby or circle the aisles, eyes peeled for people loading up their vehicle.  “That doesn't really work, I hate to tell you,” he said. “You spend a lot of time driving around and then you get frustrated. I just spent a half an hour in the parking lot and I haven’t even gotten in. Why did I even come here?” Mark avoids the front entrance altogether. Instead, he puts on his blinkers and stakes out the same location at every Costco he visits – off on one side about 50 yards away. He rarely has to wait long and it’s a short stroll to the warehouse doors.  “I’ve invested a lot of time in my parking strategy because I shop at Costco once a week to every 10 days on average,” Mark said. “That's a lot of trips to Costco.” Can't get enough Costco? Dip into our coverage:Meet Costco's most devoted fansThis is probably why you spend so much at CostcoPolicy or pushing limits? The heated debate over Costco's return policyShopper beware: It's 'Mad Max' with shopping cartsHow the Costco hot dog became America's happy mealWhy America loves Costco free samplesUSA TODAY covers the culture of Costco, from the way it gets shoppers to splurge to why the $1.50 hot dog is the kind of deal they relish. Have a Costco story to share? Email Jessica Guynn.