06/17/2023
Hello FaceBook peeps:
Just had an interesting experience at the parade at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon. I’m wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience??
This past Wednesday, June 14 I had a test booked at RUH. We arrived at the hospital around 7:00 am and parked in the upper level of the parkade. We proceeded into the building and used the kiosk to pay for parking. The test was going to take at least four hours so I paid $18 for all day. (Don’t get me started on how ridiculously expensive it is!)
Here’s where it gets interesting….the kiosk had an option to pay using a credit card, but there was no tap option so I couldn’t use my phone. I didn’t have a credit card with me so I had to pay cash. I stuck a $20 bill into the machine and it spit out a couple loonies, but no receipt. After a few minutes of searching, which involved getting down on my knees (not easy at my age) to look up into the machine, I found the receipt tucked up inside. My wife tucked the receipt into her purse and it’s a good thing she did. When we came out five hours later, we had a $70 parking ticket on our windshield!!!
There was a toll free number for Impark on the ticket so I called the number and explained that we paid at the kiosk and there must be a mistake. He asked how we paid and I told him we paid cash. He said they had no record of us paying. (Sounds fishy, eh?). I explained that I had a receipt and his tone changed. He put us on hold for a minute, then came back on and told us that we needed to go online and send a picture of the ticket and the receipt. We did that and got an email the next day saying that the ticket was cancelled. So no harm, no foul, right? Not really……What if we didn’t have time to search for the receipt? What if we didn’t carefully keep the receipt? What if the machine ran out of paper and didn’t give us a receipt? Pretty hard to prove that we paid cash without the receipt, right?
It would be so easy for Impark to target people who pay with cash, and rip them off for an extra $70, and in a lot of cases they would get away with it! So I’m curious to know if anyone else has had a similar experience?? Please feel free to share this post and let’s see if my suspicions have any foundation.