Perched over a pair of parking spaces, the smiling stork on the shiny new sign offers a surprise for drivers who think they've just scored a prime spot near the supermarket door:
"New and expectant moms only."Take another lap around the parking lot, pal - spots for mothers are multiplying from Georgia to Texas and Arkansas to Illinois.
"You're carrying all this weight around, you're not feeling as good as you usually do," says Caroline King of Atlanta, who is eight months pregnant with her second child. "I think they are great."
"We think that for those who are handicapped and pregnant, it's the right thing to do," says Brent Scott, a spokesman for the Cincinnati-based - and mom-friendly - Kroger stores.
This feathered figure is the guardian of the latest in parking privilege, but not everyone is necessarily feeling generous about it.
"What about people with warts on their feet?" asks E. Scott Gellar, 55, a psychologist who studies motorists and their behavior. "What about the elderly? Walking for some of us older folks isn't easy, either."
Why not hemorrhoid sufferers? Or people suffering bad-hair days?
Wait just a second - if anyone needs parking privileges, it's the parents of toddlers, says Joanie Randle of Athens, Ga., the mother of four children ages 4 to 9.
"Being pregnant is not a disability," Randle insists. "That's not the time when you need extra attention. It's when you have a 2-year-old."
A Publix Super Market manager in Atlanta got the idea from a Cuban grocery. Kroger stores copied it from a supermarket in Colorado. And Venture discount stores, based in O'Fallon, Mo., have them throughout the Midwest.
Some grocery stores in the Harris Teeter chain, based in North Carolina, offered the new mom spots more than a year ago and now reserve them for burdened souls in general, labeled loosely as "assisted parking" spots.
"Why don't we just have revolving reserved spots so each time you come to the store, you might have a chance at your own spot?" asks Karen Colvin of Atlanta, who is toddler-free and pretty much unencum-ber-ed.
Atlanta disc jockey Tom Sullivan mocked the spots on a popular morning radio show, asking, "Don't these women want the exercise?"
But he feigned on-air solidarity after fellow radio personalities made him strap on a 5-gallon jug of water and walk to the store. Talk about retaining water!
The practice can't really be enforced because there is no penalty for stealing the spots, no pregnancy police writing pink and blue tickets.
They really aren't reserved then, are they? asks Gellar, a professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.
"We learn we can do things in our cars and get away with it," he says. "`Hey, I don't have to read that map now. I'll read it in the car. I can put my makeup on in the car.' Well, people are going to say, `I'm just going to park there.'