New Parking System at Am Fam Field is either going to work flawlessly or be total chaos.

Live look at the Am Fam Field parking lots on Opening Day when people aren’t prepared for these new parking/payment rules:

I fully anticipate tribes to form, ritual sacrifices of chickens to occur, mass chaos!

In all honesty, I’m sure this will probably end up being fine, but I am very curious to see how it plays out in practice. I am also going to go ahead and assume that even though there won’t be people there to take cash or card and give you a parking stub, there will still be parking attendants on site to show you where to park once you get into the lot. Because if this is going to be a come-as-you-are situation where you can park literally anywhere and pay later then it really is going to be bedlam. I need a retired person in a brightly colored shirt to tell me where to go once I get to the game or I’m going to be flying blind.

Related: I know I’m not old. But I’m not young, either. And I do find myself getting more and more agigated with these kinds of changes as the years go by. It started with digital tickets, then it progressed to cashless inside the stadium, and now we’re parking our cars and having to scan a QR Code to pay for parking on my phone. I dunno. There’s a metaphorical bald eagle on my shoulder screaming at me that this is America and I should be able to use legal cash tender to buy parking and a hot dog after I hand a physical ticket to someone to get into the game. I’m starting to feel more and more like this:

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

PS: In all seriousness the over/under on amount of parking tickets people come back to on Opening Day should be set at 7,500. People not knowing what to do, people being too drunk to know what to do, people thinking they paid but forgot to click one more box, people who don’t know what a QR Code is, it’s going to be fascinating.

Double PS: This might be a different blog topic for a different day, but the cashless system implemented at most stadiums now has led to an EPIDEMIC of tipping. Look, I have no problem leaving a tip, I get that most of those concession stands are operated by non-prof’s or other groups raising money for one cause or another. But I drew the line last season at tipping at a self-serv/self-checkout beer stand. I stood in line, I grabbed the beer out of the cooler, I scanned it and paid for it, I’m not leaving a 15% tip unless that means I get 15% off of my beer.