Mrs SR takes one of the little SRs to rugby on Sunday mornings, and normally parks in the Lidl car park (the only parking for quite some distance around the rugby pitch). We are regular customers of the shop, and indeed, she inevitably does some shopping while little SR is with his team.

Anyway, I received a “Parking Charge Notice” yesterday for £45 (if we pay in the next two weeks) for overstaying in the car park by 24 minutes, and advice online is mixed. The car park is run by Athena, which is a member of the recognised parking organisations (or whatever they are).

£45 seems ridiculous to me – especially considering our regular custom of the shop in question.

Does Mrs SR have any alternative to paying?

Pay up and teach her to read. It’ll be cheaper in the long run.

Does Mrs SR have any alternative to paying

Very little.

Can’t see any justifiable reason to appeal to POPLA. Regardless of how often you shop there, you weren’t on the day in question.

Of course you have a proof you were shopping that day and not using their car park for your own conveyance?

I’m not sure Lidl keep records of regular users car registrations, they don’t do loyalty cards.

If you pay the £45 to Athena within the first 7 days, they send you a poster of the tennis player scratching her arse.

I use the Waitrose car park in Teignmouth to park whilst shopping in town.
The sign there says the car park is for use of Waitrose customers only.
As I am a Waitrose customer , with a bone-fide Waitrose card and everything , I feel I am entitled to park there.
If I get challenged by the parking attendant, then I would proudly say, I am a Waitrose customer , and nothing on the signing says I have to be shopping in Waitrose at the time I park there !!

Buggers never said anything or given me a ticket , so not been able to see if it would work yet 😗

I have never paid one of those demands for money with menaces. If they want to charge for parking put up a barrier, or pay someone to check tickets

Plenty of firms will make it go away for £25.

Or, tell them you don’t accept their t’s & c’s and their request for payment is denied. And any further correspondence will result in an appeals fee of £100. See how they like it.

I have never paid one of those demands for money with menaces. If they want to charge for parking put up a barrier, or pay someone to check tickets

Plenty of firms will make it go away for £25.

Or, tell them you don’t accept their t’s & c’s and their request for payment is denied. And any further correspondence will result in an appeals fee of £100. See how they like it.

Awful advice. Ignore all of this.

Go to Pepipoo for proper guidance if you want to appeal

I was fined by Lidl for parking – had no idea you were supposed to do something fiddly with your receipt and reg number in some random machine by the checkout. Sent them a complaint email and they asked me to upload my receipt and they waived the fine.

Assuming she shopped that day, go direct to Lidl rather than getting involved in the parking company.

Email customer services, send them the receipt. Mention regular custom if you like. Don’t mention rugby.

They can call off the parking agency, who just work for them anyway (and whose profits depend on being intransigent with people like you). This works for our local Aldi.

Go to Pepipoo for proper guidance if you want to appeal

Which will be denied.

#justsaying

Probably best to take it up with Lidl Head Office. Say how appalled you are as a loyal customer. Alternatively contact them on Twitter. Companies don’t like negative stories on social media.

Assuming you were shopping there send Lidl the receipt and they’ll sort you out.

If you weren’t shopping then tough tittie I’m afraid. Either pay up or ignore and see what happens. An appeal won’t work.

Sent them a complaint email and they asked me to upload my receipt and they waived the fine.

Yup that’s the difference you were shopping there not taking your kid to rugby practice.

The law was changed a few years ago, they are now very much entitled to enforce fines for parking violations on private property, a point which has been highly advertised and discussed many times. The boomer is living in the past (quelle surprise!)

I’ve shopped at Lidl once, can I use their car park too? What does ‘customer’ mean? It doesn’t define customer frequency, or how much you spent, or even if you have have actually used that branch. Can I carry a receipt from each of the major supermarkets and park for free wherever I like? And can I park in the parent and child spaces if I have my 15 year old with me, after all we’re parent and child!

FFS, what happened to reasonableness? I think to any reasonable person, rather than the new breed of barrack room lawyers picking apart the T&C’s, ‘customer’ means someone shopping in the store at the time doesn’t it? Tell her to go into the shop and get some sweets to eat while she’s watching the nippers and then at least there’s some justification for parking.

My local supermarket charges £2 for parking which is refunded at the till if you’ve spent a fiver which seems fair enough.

Meanwhile – tell her to pay up, and frankly, ask where this sits on the don’t be a dick continuum.

A few comments:
– talk with store manager first; provide proof of shopping in the store on the day; if receipt not available, use copy bank statement – unless paid in cash
– have proof available of spending in the store since, let’s say, 1st Dec; this shows you to be regular customer
– if store manager does not cancel the charge, contact Lidl customer services or UK chief exec
– do not use the word ‘appeal’ in any contact with PPC as that suggests you accept you were wrong; they have issued you an invoice which you are disputing.

It could be worse, Lidl could be using Parking Eye.

I’d think they’d be some flexibility if you could prove you shopped there that day but if you didn’t and also overstayed the assumably 2 hours max as well then I think it’d be a case of paying up

As I am a Waitrose customer , with a bone-fide Waitrose card and everything , I feel I am entitled to park there.
If I get challenged by the parking attendant, then I would proudly say, I am a Waitrose customer , and nothing on the signing says I have to be shopping in Waitrose at the time I park there !!

I can’t decide if this post is serious or not 🤷

“s I am a Waitrose customer , with a bone-fide Waitrose card and everything , I feel I am entitled to park there.
If I get challenged by the parking attendant, then I would proudly say, I am a Waitrose customer , and nothing on the signing says I have to be shopping in Waitrose at the time I park there !!”

Seroius or no, 100% agree!     I spend £1000’s in Waitrose on an annual basis so I flippin well park there whenever I’m in town and I bet a waitrose essential avacado scoop that they would waive a fine even if I hadn’t shopped on that day.

This isn’t not enforceable in Scotland don’t know about rUK though.

Bravo @revs1972 perfect satire as now demonstrated.

We’ll pay up. I was asking because I know the framework within which private parking companies operate has changed since 2012, and I still think that £45 is excessive. But oh well. Live and learn.

Having said that, @theotherjonv, you’re being pretty harsh I think.

I did say in the OP that, as well as taking the little guy to rugby, Mrs SR also shopped in there. As, indeed, she did on the day in question. There are two branches of Lidl close to us – one of which is the branch in question – and between them, I couldn’t count the hundreds of pounds we spend per year. On this occasion, obviously, she overstayed as the practice went over by a number of minutes.

But anyway, I’m not making excuses or trying to “be a dick”; I thought it was worth asking before shelling out £45.

Sc-xc, It was a bloke not a girl in the poster. Look at the shoulders.

If you were shopping in Lidl for the entire time (+ 24 minutes) you would be charged so I don’t really see how the charge can be contested.

Mrs SR also shopped in there. As, indeed, she did on the day in question.

Contact Lidl then. As she was, in fact, a customer they should get it cancelled.

£45 seems ridiculous to me – especially considering our regular custom of the shop in question.

It’s probably there to discourage people parking on their car park for three hours at a weekend and then buggering off to take their kid to rugby, tying up a parking space which could be used by a paying customer. Sounds like it’s not high enough as it’s not working. (-:

@revs You might struggle with that now.

I was working at the Waitrose in Teignmouth just before Christmas….. transforming it into a new Lidl store.

I didn’t mean to specifically target you @saxonrider, but this does irk me a bit. I think it’s reasonable that you get a period for parking while you are shopping in a shop and if you break the rules, by overstaying because you did something else as well, or just did something else then I don’t have a lot of sympathy.

Asking where it was on the Dick <—–> Not a Dick scale wasn’t aimed entirely at your wife, or indeed I wasn’t actually saying where on that scale this offence is, just asking if reflection may be in order. And I’m also suggesting the other ‘I regularly shop there so the rules are different for me’ folks ask that question too.

Maybe my moral standards are higher than I need for 21st century living.

In respect of the £45 is a lot. One of the defences against a Parking Charge Notice used to be that the charge should be in line with the losses sustained by the land owner (which when parking was free and the costs were an automatic letter plus stamp amounted basically to buttons), but in the landmark case that Beavis brought, the judge agreed that the penalty could be high enough to be a disincentive but not so high to be unconscionable. And £45 seems to be quite reasonable in that respect.

I had one from an Aldi car park I ignored it. The follow-up letter also went in the bin. I heard nothing more.
That’s my experience.

Funnily enough, a pub we went to last year is similarly blighted, you have to register your car when you go in. I totally missed the signage and got a fine, mailed the pub and they said they’d cancel it, few weeks later a reminder comes through. Sent a few more mails but no response so popped in today, signage massively bigger, assistant manager sorted it no problem – I said, does this take up much of your time? Flamboyant puffing out of cheeks – “done six already today, we get eight or ten every single day”. One wonders what benefit the pub gets.

I spent £249 on a tv at my local Lidl.and took the car to take it home.Forgot to scan the receipt,went back in a panic ,spoke to store manager,he said “If they send you a letter,bring it in ,you’ve a store receipt for the time,we’ll make it go away”.That was 6 weeks ago,I’ve not had a letter,nice people at our Lidl.The till staff point the rules out to anyone they don’t recognise.

I have no time for these people. The BPA are basically a front for the same sheisters that used to go and clamp people who dared to park outside dominos while they went to Steel’s cycles next door.

I escaped one of their “enforcement notifications” having been done for parking my motorbike in a car bay at a large shopping centre. Loaded with a pile of arrogance and a guess that the BPA’s agreement with the DVLA is one-directional, I made the asssumption that their letter threatening prosecution is only as good as the data they get from the DVLA. So what if I told them indirectly the data was wrong?

As we get next to no mail, the next part was easy: armed with a nice bright magicshine light I just pre-read any suspicious mail I got before it was opened (easily found as nobody but the DVLA know my middle name), marked it as “unknown, return to sender” and bunged it back in the post. This caused whatever system these people use to go into meltdown and resulted in the generation of several letters that clearly required significant manual intervention on their behalf, most pleasing. There was one which had an actual real signature, meaning a real otherwise unemployable had to get involved. Perfect.

All the letters basically said the same thing: that they really, really wanted to contact the registered keeper of vehicle ########, and that failing to notify the DVLA of my new address was an offence. Which of course I wasn’t committing as all I was doing was sending the parking enforcement company’s letters back to them. I held off of my usual trick of attaching unwanted correspondence to a house brick before dropping it in the bulk mail box, but the thought was there.

The upshot of all this was: they gave up. They have no way of backlinking to the DVLA so Swansea don’t care, it cost them lots to deal with and I got to smirk at their systemic confusion.

Should anyone else wish to adopt my contemptuous approach to scumball organisations such as this I can heartily recommend “Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them” by R.T.Fishall. A fantastic compendium of middle finger raising. Best bit is the pseudonym belonged to the late Sir Patrick Moore.

SR – you would be mad to pay the invoice without talking to Lidl first.

If you still have proof you shopped there then have a word with the manager.

@revs You might struggle with that now.

I was working at the Waitrose in Teignmouth just before Christmas….. transforming it into a new Lidl store.

Excellent, now I can have 90 mins free parking when I take the kids to the skate park 😉

They are changing the one in Torquay to a Lidl too. Obviously not the right demographic for Waitrose in the area 😂😂

See, I agree with a few people above. Lidl buy/lease that land to offer somewhere for their customers to park whilst they shop. Now if you go to Lidl for 30 mins, pop in to a couple of other shops and then drive off then they shouldn’t charge you.
But if you pop in for 2 mins and buy a bag of sweets before leaving the car there for 2 hours whilst you’re at the rugby then I think they’re entitled to say you’re taking the proverbial and issue a fine.

Local council has started charging for town centre parking. Lidl across the road have reduced parking to 90 minutes and changed signs to say “Customers currently shopping at Lidl”. Seems they’re out to get you “loyal” customers that aren’t shopping on the day.

Don’t even get me started on people abusing parent and child spaces. Usual on here is parent one parking right next to shop door and parent 2 going in to shop leaving kids and other parent in car. Or mother driving white BMW/Mercedes/Evoque and empty child seat parking in space.
Tesco are getting wise to this as well and changing signage to state parent shopping with child under five.

Aye, pay the fine and learn the lesson. My weekly shop in Aldi or lidl never takes longer than 30 mins tops, the time they give is more than adequate.

That’s my point….we all know what’s reasonable really don’t we but there are some that just don’t care and use the examples of the type above and ‘letter of the law’ arguments to justify the fact that they basically DGAS. So it has to be spelt out.

West Kirby supermarket has a terminal near packing area you have to enter your vehicle reg in to stop receiving a parking charge notice,reason being people where parking all day at supermarket car park and using the train next door to travel further afield,now the other supermarket localy is following suit, while the council pay as you park car park is empty most of the day.

A lot of supermarkets also have parking enforcement done not by the supermarket/store but the landlords,so appealing to the manager, is pointless and just wastes their time.

Car culture wow. Have you ever thought of walking. Remember the old saying driving makes you fat and costs you £s. Cycling burns fat and…. costs you £s (well it costs me £s as I keep buying bikes and bike gear. Anyway cut down on your driving start walking to these places and you won’t get hit with these mental parking fines.

This is from someone who can’t drive for 12 weeks. I’m into week 5 of my cold turkey so still in the holier than though phase 🤪