This post is a true story – that happens to contain affiliate links. 

A few weeks ago, I had an accidental run in with a parking attendant that really boggled my personal finance literate mind that I want to share with you today.

For those outside the tri-state area, you may not know that NJ Transit is like… the worst. And lately, it’s even worse than the worst. While I worked from home this summer, I had to go into NYC twice and both times things happened that messed up my ability to take a train.

On the day of this story, it was a gas leak. I arrive nice and early for what I knew would be a terrible train ride, since it was in the peak of rush hour, from NJ to NYC. I bought my train ticket online and, stupidly, activated it a few minutes before the train pulled in – since I’ve had connectivity issues before.

At about five minutes after the scheduled time, I noticed about five people silently exit the crowed platform. I thought, “hmmm, a little weird.” About ten minutes after the scheduled time, I started searching the NJ Transit app to see what was up, after a few more minutes of scroll, I saw that all trains going through my section of tracks (and the next few above and below me) were cancelled due to a gas leak.

No announcement was made.

No clear update was on the app – you really had to look for it.

And there was no time frame for when the trains would be up and running again.

Fortunately, I own a car. So I hopped in my car, bit the bullet that I was going to wind up paying two to three times as much to get into the city that day, and headed to NYC.

I had a meeting down by Union Square, that I was now pretty close to running late for, so as I sat in some tunnel traffic, I tried to look up parking spots near Union Square. My SpotHero app showed me a garage nearby for $25. I went to try to buy a spot and my app froze and wouldn’t let me pay. I tried to go through Safari to the actual website and couldn’t get the pages to load to update my credit card.

When I got to the garage, it was $52 to park. However, I was now out of time, so it was where I was parking.

As the attendant helped check me in, I mentioned the SpotHero price and this triggered a rant from him along the lines of:

All these rich people take those spots. We only got a certain number of them each day and these guys over here with the Mercedes-Benz and the sports cars. Those guys take the spots every day. They don’t need that money. Look it your car, I mean, I don’t mean any offense, but you know, those spots should be for folks like you. Folks with cars like yours never use those deals.

Which… made me laugh a little to myself. Cause I was a little pissed about the $52, but we all know it’s not going to break my bank.

The attendant though was happy to help a lady out though and when I told him there were still a few on the app, I was just having trouble getting it to load, told me that I could still claim a spot, if it was available, after I was parked and I didn’t have to have the code till I was leaving.

News to me. Maybe helpful news to you too.

Now, I actually toned down the parking attendant’s rant a little cause it was amusingly colorful at times and a little more #downwiththerichfolks than I indicated, but what fascinated me was that he never once seemed to do stuff like paying attention to where your money goes and using simple little tricks to get the best price are how people are able to buy Mercedes-Benz and sports cars.

I mean, it’s NYC and who knows those folks financial state. They could have gigantic salaries. They could also have piles of debt for those fancy cars.

The things is though, those discount spots are available to anyone.

I walked out of the parking garage into better cell service and snagged the deal myself.

The rich aren’t always hoarding the best deals. Often times the rich get that way from using all the deals available to them wisely. Sometimes the poor stay that way because they don’t take advantage of the deals right in front of them.

And I mean the… “I had to buy a used car” poor or the “we could only eat out once this week and it had to be somewhere cheap” poor. Not the “we’re on food stamps and stuck in a poverty cycle” poor, cause heaven knows SpotHero isn’t going to do much to help that kind of poor.

Have you ever had a conversation with a stranger that opened your eyes to people’s financial mindsets a little?

 

And if you haven’t used SpotHere to find the best, cheapest parking spots yet, you can sign up through this link to get $7 of your first checkout.