Illustrative Image: Parket logo. (Image: Parket website) | Admyt. (Image: admyt website) | Phone mock-ups. (Image: resource boy) | Underground parking. (Photo: Freepik) 
The other day I attempted to pop into the Cresta shopping mall because I needed to buy some belts at one of their anchor tenants.
I was humming softly to myself as I approached the parking boom. It was a rare Gauteng day this La Niña November when the sun was shining, it was just after nine in the morning, it was a major shopping centre... what could possibly go wrong?
Amazingly I was able to find what I needed, pay for it without queuing and return to my car.
I suddenly realised that Cresta, for reasons that surpasseth understanding, does not use the parking app Admyt (to be fair to them, unlike many other shopping centres, they do give you three hours free if you park outside, and you can’t argue with that).
I’d become so used to just having the boom lift when it was time to leave that I’d almost forgotten that this could happen.
A week later I was at Melrose Arch and was reminded that, in fact, they don’t use Admyt. They use Parket.
I’m not sure why they would use a different app, but I think it has something to do with the fact that Melrose Arch does everything it can to appear apart from South Africa and Parket is based in Cape Town.
I can hear your sigh when I bring up the issue of parking.
I don’t think anything has caused me more intense frustration over the years than parking in some of our shopping malls.
For one thing, I’ve never understood why on Earth so many of these systems still rely on printing something on dead trees. We all know that printers are the weakest link in any IT chain. And yet, around the country, malls rely on printers.
And then, amazingly, you have to put that paper into some kind of machine.
Apart from the fact that this little piece of paper has to be perfectly straight, dry and actually readable (after several hours in my custody), it just takes so long.
Many years ago I came to realise that Killarney Mall’s parking layout at the time was just unusable. They had a person in a booth at the end of the lot, but the lot itself had a line of cars on each side, so the slightest queue meant you could not move your car out.
Once, while still in my twenties and stuck at the back of a queue of about 10 cars (I’m sure a piece of paper was the problem) I watched a woman older than me get out of her car and demand, in the most precise use of the English language, that the boom be opened and everyone released.
In the process I was both impressed and educated. The last time I had heard all of those words being used together was at the bottom of a scrum.
Now some of our malls have become so big that paying for parking has become really big business.
A friend of mine recently confessed the reason he never ever goes to the Mall of Africa nowadays is that he can never find his car afterwards.
They have thousands of cars going in and out every day. Some of them have come and gone more than once (If you email me and tell me you have never been to a mall twice in one day I will ask if you have ever had children).
So the money to be made here is huge. That’s why the malls charge you – it must be a big revenue spinner for them.
As I’m sure you know, the business model for these parking apps is incredibly simple. They charge you just R1 every time you pay for parking. So if you go to Sandton City (which sensibly uses the Gauteng app) and Sandton charges you R20 for parking, you will be billed R21.
They also charge the malls an operating fee.
But this also means that it’s taken these companies a long time to scale up. They needed people to sign up, and they needed malls to sign up. And to get that moving took a while.
It’s one of those businesses that specialises in taking a tiny bit from a high volume of customers. But this also explains why, despite starting nearly 10 years ago, Admyt seems to be reaching some kind of critical mass now.
I do think that soon these apps will start to be in a stronger position.
It’s not just that more people are signing up and that they’re being used in more malls. It’s that I’m sure they’re aware of how valuable their data will become. They’ll be able to tell you how many people driving Land Cruisers shop in Sandton in December, how long they stayed at each mall and how much they spend each month on parking.
More interestingly, they might also be able to tell you that someone went to Design Quarter, Sandton City and Benmore all in the same (no doubt incredibly frustrating) morning. That would indicate they could not find what they wanted, and speak to the mix of shops these malls have.
I know the parking business can be incredibly frustrating. But for the first time, it might be about to be quite exciting as well. DM