boakes.org

Is it wrong to gain commercial profit through somebody else’s law breaking? Perhaps its morally wrong, but its not necessarily unlawful: so every day, when the corner shop near us profits indirectly as its customers ignore parking laws, where does their responsibility end?

The shop is on the corner of a T-junction of between two residential streets. Painted around each corner are double yellow lines, a signal to vehicle users that it’s illegal to park there.

Generally it’s dangerous to park on corners because it forces an emerging vehicle into the flow of traffic without visibility of what’s oncoming. In this case the lines are particularly sensible because the shop sells sweets to kids, and essentials to elderly locals, so there are often small or slow pedestrians crossing the road on the corner. People who can’t see over or around cars, and who need space to be able to cross safely.

Many of the shop’s customers however, don’t arrive on foot: they arrive by car. After parking on the yellow lines they nip in and out, taking a few minutes (or longer when there’s a queue), and they’re gone long before any traffic warden wanders by. Even if there is a warden lurking (a rarity), they’re only going to ticket one or two of the hundreds of cars each day that use the convenience of bending the highway code in order to make their day easier (rather than finding a parking space in the already impossibly congested street). So the dangerous practice continues.

The shop knows it happens, but does nothing to stop it. Possibly because they’ve never considered the ethics of their place in the community, or because doing something would put a huge dent in their profits. Perhaps they should refuse to serve customers who park illegally, but there are so many of them that the commercial impact might compromise the shop’s viability (and ironically this would force their local pedestrian customers further away, so they’d have to cross more roads, and would thus be more likely to be in an accident).

But what if a local kid were to get really badly hurt, or worse, as a direct result of convenience shoppers bending the law in this way? It’s unlikely that the shop could be tried for corporate manslaughter. It’s unlikely that the hundreds of dangerously parked convenience shoppers who park there every day would think twice about their involvement in the chain of events. Would the unfortunate driver, who’d been unsighted by all the parked cars bear the brunt of media and social criticism? Would we then stand up and declare that something should have been done, and someone should have said something?

Is there point where companies should be required to carry the social irresponsibilities that their customers shrug off?