The Great Walmart Parking Lot Incident

The Great Walmart Parking Lot Incident
Positions of the vehicles at 10:52 a.m. on June 16, 2018. Space 114 is shaded; the Oldsmobile (A) and the pickup truck (B) are shown stopped on either side of it. Diagram adapted from the Wapsie Bend Township incident report.
Date	June 16, 2018 (2018-06-16)
Time	10:52 a.m. – 7:58 p.m. (CDT)
Duration	9 hours, 6 minutes
Venue	Parking lot, Walmart Supercenter #4471-B
Location	Harlan's Fork, Iowa, United States
Also known as	The Space 114 Standoff The Long Wait
Type	Parking dispute
Cause	Simultaneous arrival at a single vacant space
Participants	Verna Kolacki Dwayne "Buck" Raeburn c. 2,300 onlookers
Outcome	Space left permanently vacant; annual Space 114 Days festival
Deaths	0
Non-fatal injuries	1 (sunburn)
Property damage	None
Arrests	0

The Great Walmart Parking Lot Incident, also known as the Space 114 Standoff, was a nine-hour dispute on June 16, 2018, between two motorists who arrived simultaneously at the same vacant parking space outside the Walmart Supercenter in Harlan's Fork, Iowa. Neither driver yielded, and the standoff, which was conducted throughout in what witnesses described as "a spirit of mutual, polite refusal", attracted an estimated 2,300 onlookers, two local radio stations, a church choir and a funnel cake vendor before ending at 7:58 p.m.

The space, designated Space 114 in the store's lot plan, was afterward left permanently vacant by local custom and is now marked with a small plaque. The incident is commemorated annually by Space 114 Days, a two-day folk festival that drew 14,000 visitors in 2025, and it has been the subject of a folk song, a high school play and a study by the United States Department of Unnecessary Research. Store employees were widely praised for their handling of the event, which included the provision of shade, water and folding chairs to both drivers.

Background

Setting

Harlan's Fork is a town of approximately 6,800 people in western Iowa. Its Walmart Supercenter, opened in 2004, is the largest retail building in the county and is described in a 2017 town guide as "the closest thing Harlan's Fork has to a town square". The store's lot contains 612 spaces. Space 114 is located in the row nearest the garden center entrance and is shaded in the afternoon by a light pole and a decorative honey locust tree, making it, according to a 2019 survey of local residents, "the most desirable space in the county".

Participants

Verna Kolacki, then 71, was a retired school librarian who drove a 1994 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. She told reporters that she had parked in Space 114 "most Saturdays since 2006" and regarded it as "not mine, exactly, but familiar". Dwayne "Buck" Raeburn, then 44, was a seed salesman who drove a 2011 pickup truck. He stated that he had "no particular feelings about that space before that morning" but that, having arrived first, he "didn't see why I'd leave". The two had not previously met.

The standoff

Arrival (10:52 a.m.)

At approximately 10:52 a.m., Kolacki's Oldsmobile approached Space 114 from the east and Raeburn's pickup approached from the west. Both vehicles stopped with their front bumpers roughly 4 feet from the space's painted boundary. Both drivers had activated turn signals. Security camera footage reviewed by the township later established that the two vehicles had arrived within 0.4 seconds of each other, a margin the township clerk described as "too close to call, and we tried".

According to witnesses, Kolacki lowered her window and said "Go ahead, dear", to which Raeburn replied "No, ma'am, you go ahead". Neither driver moved. The exchange was repeated, with minor variations, an estimated 140 times over the course of the day.

Escalation

Timeline of June 16, 2018

Time	Event
10:52 a.m.	Both vehicles arrive at Space 114
11:15 a.m.	Assistant store manager Gloria Feeney-Okafor approaches; both drivers decline to move
11:40 a.m.	First onlookers gather; a shopper photographs the vehicles
12:30 p.m.	Store employees bring water and two folding chairs; both drivers accept water, decline chairs
1:05 p.m.	KHFI-AM begins live coverage
1:50 p.m.	Township constable arrives; determines no law has been broken and remains "to observe"
2:30 p.m.	Funnel cake vendor sets up near cart corral 9
3:15 p.m.	Kolacki accepts a folding chair and sits beside her car; Raeburn follows at 3:17 p.m.
4:00 p.m.	Crowd estimated at 1,100; First Lutheran Church choir performs
5:20 p.m.	Mayor of Harlan's Fork, Dale Hutchens, offers to mediate; both decline politely
6:45 p.m.	Crowd peaks at c. 2,300
7:40 p.m.	A third motorist, unaware of the situation, drives into Space 114 from the north
7:44 p.m.	The third motorist, on being informed of the situation, reverses out and apologizes
7:58 p.m.	Kolacki and Raeburn simultaneously agree that neither will take the space and park elsewhere

Through the afternoon the event acquired the character of a public gathering. Several onlookers brought lawn chairs and coolers, and a group of teenagers sold lemonade from the bed of a truck parked in Space 211. Store staff placed traffic cones around the two vehicles to allow other shoppers to pass, set up a pop-up canopy for shade, and periodically announced over the store's public-address system that "Space 114 remains under discussion". Store manager Lyle Brueggeman later said that the staff's aim had been "to keep everyone comfortable and keep the lot moving", and that "nobody was in anybody's way, really, except each other's".

Partisanship

By mid-afternoon the crowd had divided into supporters of each driver, identified by improvised signs reading "VERNA'S SPACE" and "BUCK HAD HIS BLINKER ON". A local radio host conducted an informal poll, which found 52 percent support for Kolacki and 41 percent for Raeburn, with 7 percent responding that "they should both just park farther out". Despite this, observers consistently described the atmosphere as friendly; the township constable, Arnold Peske, wrote in his report that "the crowd was the most courteous I have ever seen in the presence of a funnel cake".

Media coverage

Live coverage on KHFI-AM began at 1:05 p.m., when the station's Saturday host, Merle Vandenbosch, abandoned a scheduled program on lawn care to broadcast from the lot. A second station, KWIA-FM, joined at 2:40 p.m. By late afternoon, the two stations were broadcasting from opposite sides of the space and had, according to one listener, "begun to take sides themselves". Vandenbosch conducted eleven interviews with Kolacki and nine with Raeburn over the course of the day, in each of which the participant was asked whether they were prepared to move. All twenty answers were recorded as some variation of "after you".

Photographs taken by onlookers circulated on social media from about 2 p.m., and by evening the hashtag #Space114 had been used approximately 61,000 times. A regional television crew from Omaha arrived at 6:30 p.m. but, finding no available parking, broadcast its report from the shoulder of the adjoining state highway.

Resolution

At 7:40 p.m. a third motorist, later identified as a visitor from Omaha, drove into Space 114, apparently unaware of the situation. According to witnesses, the crowd fell silent. The motorist, on being informed of the circumstances by Brueggeman, reversed out and apologized to both drivers. Kolacki and Raeburn then conferred for approximately ten minutes, after which they announced, in Raeburn's words, that "if it's going to cause all this, nobody should have it". Both moved their vehicles to nearby spaces, 112 and 116, and went into the store together. Kolacki purchased potting soil; Raeburn purchased a garden hose.

Aftermath

Space 114

Since June 2018, Space 114 has remained vacant by local custom. Store management, after consulting the town council, placed a small brass plaque on the light pole in 2019 reading "SPACE 114 — LEFT OPEN IN THE SPIRIT OF JUNE 16, 2018". The space is not formally reserved, and on the rare occasions when out-of-town visitors park in it, residents reportedly "say nothing, but look". In 2023 a petition to the Iowa Department of Transportation to designate the space a historic site was declined on the grounds that it is "a parking space".

Participants after the incident

Kolacki and Raeburn became friends and served together as grand marshals of the first Space 114 Days in 2019. Kolacki died in 2024 at the age of 77; her obituary noted that she "never once took Space 114 after that day". Raeburn continues to attend the festival and has given an estimated 300 interviews about the incident, in each of which he has confirmed that he had his blinker on.

Town council deliberations

The Harlan's Fork town council discussed the incident at its meeting of June 25, 2018, and again on July 9. Council members considered, and rejected, proposals to paint Space 114 a different color, to install a sign reading "FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED", and to ask the store to remove the space entirely. Councilwoman Jolene Strait argued that "the space did nothing wrong". The council ultimately passed a non-binding resolution "commending the courtesy displayed by all parties on June 16, including the store staff and the gentleman from Omaha". The resolution has been read aloud at the opening of every Space 114 Days festival since 2019.

Department of Unnecessary Research study

In 2019 the United States Department of Unnecessary Research published Simultaneous Arrival Events in Retail Parking Environments, a 290-page report that used the Harlan's Fork incident as its principal case study. The report modelled the probability of simultaneous arrival at a given space as 1 in 4.1 million per day for a lot of Harlan's Fork's size, and recommended "a gentle hand wave" as the most efficient resolution protocol. The report was cited during a 2020 House appropriations debate as an example of the Department's "commitment to completeness".

Legacy

Space 114 Days

Space 114 Days is held annually on the third weekend of June. Its events include a "Courtesy Contest", in which pairs of contestants compete to yield to each other for as long as possible (the record, set in 2022, is 3 hours 51 minutes), a funnel cake competition, and a ceremonial reading of the township incident report. The festival is supported by local businesses including the store, which provides parking and, in a gesture regarded locally as fitting, cordons off Space 114 for the weekend.

In culture

The incident is the subject of the folk song "Go Ahead, Dear", recorded by the Loess Hills String Band in 2019, which reached number 3 on a regional country chart. A play, The Blinker, was staged by Harlan's Fork High School in 2020 and has since been performed by community theaters in four states. The phrase "a Space 114" is used in western Iowa to describe a situation in which two parties are too polite to proceed.

Sociologists have cited the incident alongside the Ohio Shopping Cart Migration of 2019 and the Office Microwave Accords as an example of communities forming lasting institutions around trivial disputes. During The Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2026, a truck queue at a store near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was widely compared to the incident, though commentators in Harlan's Fork rejected the comparison on the grounds that the Harrisburg queue "had no one in it being polite on purpose". The International Association of Professional Yappers devoted its 2021 summer retreat to the question "Who Should Have Had Space 114?" and was unable to reach a decision.

See also

• Ohio Shopping Cart Migration of 2019
• Office Microwave Accords
• Rubber duck diplomacy
• Lesser Tumbleton, Minnesota