Do drivers who work for towing companies get paid by the hour or on commission based on how many cars they bring in?
As an ex-cop and business owner, I’ve heard every excuse there is.
Two more certainties to add to death & taxes: no one thinks they’re a bad driver, and no one ever thinks they deserve a tow/boot.
As an off-duty cop, my weekend job was working at a 24 hour restaurant from
11pm to 7am to control the crowds, quell disturbances, and generally keep the after-hours (drunk) patrons and cruising teens in line. Every night people would park there in front of the “Parking for Customers Only” signs and head for the theater or other stores. If I saw them, I’d politely shoo them away, but of course we towed many every night.
One night, a man came looking for me to report his cars stolen. I explained the deal, and told him where to go, but he looked very familiar to me, and I did to him as well. As we’re standing there going through our lives trying to figure out how we knew each other, a woman and her parents showed up screaming and demanding to know WTF had happened to their cars, yada, yada, yada.
Ding. Now I know. The young lady with the sailor-embarassing vocabulary was in fact, a former GF of mine - a casual, hook-up kind of thing that ended amicably, and left us friends. Good enough to meet for dinner & drinks with her new BF when he came along some time later. And of course, that’s the guy I’ve been chatting with. Turns out she & her parents met BF for dinner, (2 cars) and decided to park here & walk there. Oh well.
Try as I might, I could not get the towing company to budge, and they had to pay bags of cash to get their cars back. I haven’t heard from her since then.
I always felt bad about that (only a little), so when I opened a business here in Buckhead (the nightlife part of Atlanta) I kept it in mind.
My shop was on the main drag, within walking distance to a dozen clubs and restaurants. Couple this with the fact that an 8 story condo was right behind me, and their only entrance/exit was the easement through my parking lot, it promised to be problematic.
I tried to be a good neighbor at first, going to the condo folks and arranging a plan with them. Since my shop had been empty for a year or more, the tenants in the condo had decided that my lot was their lot, nevermind that they have secure underground parking that is much more convenient. My offer was that I would have the lot during the day, and they could use it at night. We made sure that each tenant got this info, and my personal number should they have questions.
Sadly, I underestimated the general level of sefishness and arrogance of the tenants, and had to ask people to move their cars every freaking day for months, so that my customers could park in my own lot.
Couple this with the trash, beer bottles, used condoms, and vomit that each morning brought me from the local revelers, I eventually had enough.
No Parking signs went up, the edict was given to the condo managers and tenants, and I searched for a suitable towing company. I found one who agreed to do my bidding and turned him loose. Looking back, I should have gotten a cut of the action and retired years ago, but I think that’s illegal!
If someone were thoughtful enough to simply come ask me if they could park & go elsewhere, I let them. If the condo folks had overnight guests who needed to park, all they had to do was tell me and I let them. I’m generally a nice guy, but we all know how that turns out!
Property owners are entitled to the use and control of their property, and I just can’t understand why so many people can’t or won’t accept this, and govern themselves accordingly.
One reason our area put into place limits on the tow companies was there was a case where they towed cars from people at the debutante dance. And those people have money and influence and got ticked off so they got limits put on tow companies.
I can think of one case where a bunch of people fought a towing and won.
Out back of my apartment is a street with maybe a couple hundred parking spots. There was a snow emergency and everyone was told to move their cars. Those who didn’t got towed.
Their fault, right?
Nope – The towing company made the announcement over a loudspeaker at around 3 am, and started towing at 3:05 am. As it turns out, the local politician that declared the emergency was getting kickbacks from the towing company. I don’t know how many cars they got that night, but I’m pretty sure it was over 50.
Victims of this scam got their money back plus more.
Small Claims Court generally can’t be used for precedence.
Heres one way :
I doubt you’ll have any luck disputing the ticket. That parking lot is private property, and is intended for the use of the customers or employees of that business. It’s not their problem that your boyfriend’s parking space is too far, or inconvenient, or unsafe. They are entitled to determine who is allowed to park in their lot, and in my opinion, they are under no moral obligation to let your boyfriend park there for free.
Parsing whether “overnight” means all night or at night or whatever is sort of beside the point. Your boyfriend knew he was taking a chance, and he got caught.
Pay the fine and take them to small claims court.
This guy is my new hero.
It’s amazing to me that a predatory towing company can’t just be charged with grand theft auto at the outset.
If you want to live dangerously, find the lot and take your vehicle back. FWIU You can’t be charged for stealing your own property, but you could accumulate a bunch of other stuff, like trespassing, breaking and entering, and vandalism. I know of at least one guy who simply went to the yard after hours, cut the lock off the gate and left after re-securing it. The cops were called, but ultimately the company couldn’t prove that it ever actually had the vehicle in it’s possession. The lot had no surveillance, nor overnight attendant.
The store owners property ws being used by someone who was not a customer, so a lot of the blame go to the van owner.
But In San Jose, CA Every drive way has to have a sign before they can leagally tow. Check to see what the towing laws are in your city. You are better off paying the tow fees while they are small and then go to SCC. Go after both the property owner and the tow company.
How is it not theft (and maybe even extortion) in this case? Lawyers, please.
What if you’re about to get towed, but are not yet on the truck or hooked in any way. Can you take off? What if the tow guy insists he’s taking your car, and not yet hooked? Cool to flee?
IANAL. But I suspect there’s some information missing here. Possibly, signage that indicates “Unrestricted parking during church hours. By permit only at other times.” Also, we don’t know what kind of local ordinances might empower the tow-ers. The case in point was definitely not during “normal church hours,” and the violator did not have a permit. Anyway, to reiterate, I think some info is missing.
I once parked my car across the street in my apartment complex. It was in a parking lot, on the complex grounds, and it was in a place where about 20 spots were but only 3-4 people ever parked. My car was broken down and I didn’t have the money to pay for it, so I parked it in the furthest corner possible and left it for a couple of weeks.
They towed it. I had to pay for the tow, pay for it to get towed to a mechanic, pay for the repairs, and only then bring it home.
I think that was pretty unfair - no one ever used those spots, and the car wasn’t bothering anyone. But they can tow your car pretty much from anywhere if it’s not on your property. We had no legal rights, and just sucked it up and paid and hitched up our belts for a while.
Tow companies are bastards and they don’t care a whit what your story was. They are just in it to make a buck. Thank goodness I have my “own” property to park on now.
This happened back in college. My roommate was parked in a spot in our apartment complex. There’s a wooden post in front of the spot that used to have a sign attached, but the sign wasn’t actually there - and hadn’t been for the two whole years I’d lived there. It’s always just been an empty post.
Well the car got towed, the tow company claiming it was parked in a handicapped spot. They didn’t accept “but the spot was wholly unmarked” as a valid excuse. Unfortunately for the tow company, roommate’s dad is chief of police of one of the larger cities in the state.
The car was returned later that day. The tow company was investigated for corrupt practices and was eventually shut down.
Is this business a mom & pop or a corporate chain store? If it’s the latter then the owner is a corporation and it’s unlikely anybody at the store (including it’s manager) has the authority enter any kind of agreement. Stuff like this is handled at a corporate level and corporate prefers to have the same policy in place at all locations.
My pet peeve is people who decide it’s okay as long as they park “out of the way” :rolleyes: which just happens to be infront of our dumpsters. Even that’s not a problem except on trash day. The dumptruck pulls into the lot, sees a car blocking it’s path, driver calls store on his cell asking if someone will move it, it doesn’t belong to anybody actually in the store, dumptruck drives away and doesn’t come back untill next week. :mad: Even if corporate didn’t make us wait 24 hrs before calling a in a tow we still end up with an overflowing dumpster since they won’t wait or come back.
I would assume from a legal standpoint it is indeed theft–in fact I’m fairly confident as a non-lawyer that in the town where my tale happened it would most definitely constitute theft. However the big hang up appeared to be that in the early stages the police simply refused to become involved, when they heard it was a “towing dispute” they simply informed the pastor it was a “civil matter, not a criminal matter.” Meaning he could sue but the tow truck drivers or the owner of the tow company wasn’t going to be arrested.
I imagine if the police were 100% informed on the situation they would agree it was a clear case of outright theft, and may have pursued an arrest. However, until the police arrest somebody of a crime it typically won’t see the inside of a criminal court, and the police had dealt with so many complaints from people who got towed that the stock response was “it’s a civil matter.”
My impression at the time this was all happening was that the police were just unwilling to get involved in a towing dispute and were unlikely to believe any story that an angry vehicle owner came up with–to them it was just easier and made more sense to refer it to the civil courts.
Here is an interesting article about predatory towing.
Some Googling also suggested that prior to 2005 State legislatures were (apparently) somewhat limited in how they could regulate towing companies and the articles I’ve read seem to suggest this was the root cause of much of the “excess.”
The article I linked to starts off by describing police action in Florida targeted at arresting unscrupulous tow truck drivers who were essentially just grabbing any vehicles they could in order to extort a towing fee.
From everything I’ve heard this is a pretty common situation and I do not doubt at all that many tow companies essentially operate outside the law. In the heat of the moment with the looming fear of accumulating daily impound fees and the desperate need for one’s vehicle most people simply cave in and don’t think about it again.