The City: The Flip-Top Menace

Just a mention of the subject makes police chiefs turn purple and starts manufacturers pleading for secrecy. But there is no longer any hiding the fact that an epidemic of parking-meter jamming is sweeping the nation. Behind it are the flip-top cans now being used for beer and soft drinks. Each comes with a small pull-ring, which, when twisted free, is near enough to the size of a nickel to fit into a parking meter, either turning it on or jamming it.

Chicago reports that of the 108,628 slugs pumped into its 30,000 parking meters last month, 74,524 were flip-top rings. Some 4,000 San Francisco meters were jammed by rings in the same period, and in New York, the traffic department is collecting about 20,000 rings a month. Elmer Ploof, in charge of parking-meter collections for Detroit, has stored in the city treasurer’s safe two overflowing bushel baskets of rings taken from meters—out of sight perhaps, but not out of mind.

The can companies blame it on meters so unselective that they accept anything from religious medals and $5 gold pieces to washers and bent paper clips. They are planning, however, to change the size of their flip-top rings before the end of the year, at a cost they claim will run to millions of dollars. Until then, the police are resigned to garnering an ever-growing crop of flip-tops with a loss in revenue running into the tens of thousands.