There May Be a Steep Privacy Cost If You Park at This Trader Joe’s
14th November 2021
Parking and privacy aren’t typically things that go hand in hand. That’s changing.
Colin Shanahan discovered this during a recent visit to the Trader Joe’s grocery store in Hollywood.
After parking his car in the garage — seldom an easy task, as any SoCal TJ’s customer will attest — he was instructed by an attendant to download an app to his phone, register for service and use that for payment.
“Not wanting to give some random app a ton of personal information, I declined,” the Hollywood resident told me.
The parking-lot attendant, he said, “let me off with a warning that I wouldn’t be so lucky next time.”
Time to leave.
First of all, if you use the Metropolis app, you may not be paying just for parking. You may also be charged a “convenience fee” for your re-engineered legacy parking experience.
The company’s terms of service don’t specify how much this fee will run, stating only that the cost is “calculated as a small percentage of the total visit charge.”
No. Just … no.