Three times I have visited our local Arnold Clark, once taking a lady neighbour to buy a car, again when she had it serviced and again with her to complain about the service, on every occasion there were no proper parking spaces, maybe 150 cars strewn about, presumably for sale.

In contrast, the Toyota dealer opposite have at least 15 spaces marked out for customer parking, never had a problem finding a space there in all the years we had Toyotas.

Unless it is a brand new purpose built place, they will have to use what space they have, which admittedly is not much of an excuse, but the premises may have been built years ago when cars were (ahem) a bit smaller than most cars are these days!. I know what you mean though, and oddly enough, it is my local ford dealer (Arnold Clark) which is the worst offender!.

You can say the same about any supermarket or shopping centre, it is in their interests to make the parking easy and stress free, but in my experience, most of them have parking spaces which are far too small for the gargantuan SUV's most people seem to have (or want). The two notable exeptions (and again, i am thinking about my area), are Lidl and Aldi. Could be a reason, apart from their prices, why they are so popular?.

Most of the dealers around he seem to be pretty new.

Many supermarkets are better than dealers, but the local Aldi/Lidl aren't particularly good. At least with supermarkets they need many spaces but car dealers only need a few, increasing the size wouldn't cost much.

I'm not so worried about the width - with some dealers there's nowhere to park at all. Usually they don't have 'for sale' stickers - they may be customers' cars, trade-ins or whatever just too many of them. Agreed - those which have designated customer parking usually have spare spaces.

Several times I've driven away from a dealer having failed to park. What a stupid way to lose a customer.

Funny enough most main dealers in my area are really bad for parking, except our local Honda, whom even have several disabled spaces as well. at certain times you can even park in the sideroad outside, they allways seem busy there so I assume the parking helps with sales

If it's any sort of normal place these days,

Is there a normal place these days, most places I go drivers do as they please, and in some cases take no notice of police around at the time, parking seems acceptable by some even on crossing zig zags/double yellows, not that there will be much change(not enough cops about to do anything)