“Karen Tried to Steal My Parking Spot, So I Made Sure She Never Got Another One Again”

If there is one thing that gets on drivers’ nerves, it’s parking. No matter where you go, your chances of finding a parking spot are based on nothing more than sheer luck. And when luck is not in their favor, some individuals are willing to forget all about manners or unofficial rules just so they can get that spot.

Redditor u/firakti recently shared how they taught such a ‘determined’ driver a lesson. They had encountered a ‘Karen’ in the wild, who didn’t care for the unspoken rule of leaving the parking spot to the person who was waiting for it, and they simply couldn’t let it slide. They sought petty revenge instead. Scroll down to find the full story in their own words below.

While it’s not equally bad everywhere, parking seems to be a problem in cities all over the world. According to last year’s data from cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, parking is a headache in Poland, Spain, South Korea, Italy, Germany, Australia, France, and the US respectively, and that’s just the top eight on the list.

With lack of parking spaces being a seemingly universal problem, you might wonder why that is. Well, at least part of the problem is universal, too – the number of vehicles people own is growing. Take Europe, for instance; over the decade between 2012 and 2022, there was a 14.3% increase in the average number of passenger cars per 1,000 inhabitants (going from 490 passenger cars per 1,000 inhabitants in 2012 to 560 in 2022).

In the US, the number of cars people own seems to have been on the rise, too; according to Forbes, in the four years between 2018 and 2022 alone, the number of registered cars increased by 3.5%. By 2022, the vast majority—close to 92%—of households in the country had at least one vehicle, comprising a total of 278,870,463 cars.

While the number of cars people own is growing quite rapidly, the number of parking spots available arguably isn’t; or not at the same pace, at least. And that’s arguably one of the reasons why people might have to drive in circles looking for a place to park, likely cursing like a sailor.

But troubles with parking can do more damage than just the consequences of being seriously aggravated. It leads to people wasting large amounts of their precious time and money, too. According to Towne Park, Americans waste roughly $73 billion per year looking for parking spots. Said source suggests that drivers spend around 17 hours per year just looking for a place to park, which costs each of them roughly $345 in wasted time, fuel, and emissions. In total, a commuter reportedly loses more than 2,000 hours of their lives looking for a place to leave their car.

By the looks of it, the OP wasn’t willing to wait a minute longer than necessary. They were only waiting to let the person out of the parking spot, using a blinker to indicate that they were about to park there, but the Karen didn’t care much for the blinker, nor for the OP’s honking. Consequently, the redditor decided to teach the entitled woman a lesson; one that quite a few netizens in the comments applauded them for.