Cold weather along Japan’s northern coast assists in letting offender know what he did was not cool.

Dealing with an illegally parked car can be a huge pain. Option 1 is to spend the time to contact the authorities, wait for a tow truck to show up, and show the driver where the offending car is so it can finally be hauled away. If you don’t want to go through all that hassle, you can just ignore the car until the owner finally comes back and removes it, but by doing nothing, you’re implicitly inviting the owner to do the same thing again in the future.

However, one clever store in Japan finished out a way to do nothing and still punish offenders. Like at most supermarkets, the parking lot of the Across Plaza in Fukui Prefecture’s Echizen is for customers only. That didn’t stop one driver who wasn’t doing any shopping there from leaving their cars in the parking lot anyway, though. But rather than call the cops, the store’s staff decided to do nothing…including not clearing out any of the snow that had fallen around the car while it was illegally parked.

▼ “Looks like this car was illegally parked at the supermarket, so they enforced the parking rules in a very snowy region way,” tweeted @ponkuz along with the photo.

Like much of Japan, Fukui has had incredibly cold temperatures over the last few days, and a heavy snowfall meant Across Plaza had to clear thick banks of slush out of its parking lot…which it did, except for around the offending automobile.

Online reactions included:

“What an elegant punishment.”
“That’s a dynamic way of dealing with the situation.”
“I think they should have just thrown the car into whatever ditch they piled the rest of the snow.”
“Term of imprisonment: until the snow melts.”
“Eh, if you live in a place that gets like this in the winter, you’ve probably got access to a snow shovel and can dig your way out.”

While it’s unclear whether or not a shovel was used, the car did in fact manage to escape its icy prison. The above photo was taken slightly before noon on Sunday, and later that night, a little after midnight, another Twitter user shared this snapshot.

https://twitter.com/2hphp/status/952581144536428545

But whether the driver used a shovel or plowed through the snow, he’ll probably think twice about leaving his car parked in that particular lot again.

Source: Twitter/@ponkuz via Jin