Late last night, several people messaged us with links to a Facebook post in which a person identifying himself as an employee of private-ambulance company AMR said his employer had been banned from parking ambulances at West Seattle Thriftway (WSB sponsor) while crews awaited their next call.
As we often mention in breaking-news coverage, AMR is called in when people are not injured seriously enough to need transport by city-owned-and-operated medic units (those units are based at fire stations – West Seattle has one medic unit, Medic 32, based at Fire Station 32 in The Triangle). AMR doesn’t have a headquarters facility in our area, so you will often see a between-calls ambulance crew parked somewhere – we’ve seen them on the street and in supermarket and restaurant parking lots.
We told the people who messaged us last night that we’d look into this today. (Online comments suggested it had been circulated to TV stations hours earlier, and this story ensued late last night.) Today, Thriftway – a locally owned independent store – published this message on its own Facebook page:
AMR is a privately owned for profit company held by Clayton, Dubilier and Rice, a private investment firm worth approximately $17 Billion. In an effort to lower costs and increase profits AMR’s management has instructed their employees to operate their business out of West Seattle Thriftway’s facility.
This action consisted of parking for several hours at a time and taking up several parking stalls due to the size of the vehicles limiting spaces for our customers at peak business hours. Over the last two years several requests have been made by West Seattle Thriftway to not use prime parking during peak business hours and has been met with little compliance from AMR staff.
Contrary to what has been posted, West Seattle Thriftway HAS NOT banned anyone from shopping with us and we fully support all of the fine EMT’s, Nurses, and Emergency Professionals.
What we cannot support is an outside company’s desire to increase their bottom line profit by impacting our ability to operate our facility efficiently and provide our customers with parking during peak hours.
We are open to discussing use with AMR during non-peak hours if compliance could be assured.”
If you have any questions, we welcome your email: http://westseattlethriftway.com/contactus.html
We also spoke by phone with Thriftway’s owner Paul Kapioski, who reiterated to WSB that he has been trying to work with AMR on this for two years “and getting very little response for them. … We simply wanted to ask them to not impact customers during our prime times … I hate to tell anybody they can’t park here, but it’s a private business, running their business out of our lot.” Meantime, we have a message out to the media-relations department at AMR (whose website says the company’s in the process of being sold) asking if they have encountered similar situations elsewhere
ADDED: Here’s the response we received from AMR spokesperson Jason Sorrick:
In the 10 years I have been with the company, I cannot recall ever dealing with such a request. We post vehicles and move locations similar to police officers, and select locations based on easy access to freeways and main roads. We also tend to choose areas that are well lit at night and visible to the public to help keep our emergency crews safe while they are waiting for their next call.
Businesses are generally welcoming to our crews, and appreciate the patronage of our employees. Places like Starbucks understand our role in the community and are very accommodating to emergency personnel. If a business owner has an issue, they can simply contact us and we will be more than willing to change our posting.
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