26 ms·

Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

234 points by philip1209 3y ago

karaterobot 3y ago
> The industry’s growing footprint has not gone unnoticed. Complaints have erupted about traffic tie-ups, noise and chemical odors around locations, among other issues... City leaders have a limited number of car wash countermeasures at their disposal, such as withholding special use permits and enacting zoning changes to limit new locations. A nice summary of why things don't get fixed. There are legitimate problems with car washes: traffic tie ups, pollution. Instead of regulating to fix those problems, they regulate to limit the number of locations instead. So, the demand that exists isn't met, and nothing gets better because the existing businesses can continue being nuisances just like always.
beejiu 3y ago
> There are four full-service car washes in town, with a fifth on the way; three are bunched up on a mile-and-a-half stretch of Route 14. There's actually a game theory explantation for this called Hotelling's Law: https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/ https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/
- soared 3y ago
  Pretty interesting read but seemingly doesn’t hold super well in some real world situations. Extremely few goods have Inelastic demand and are purely differentiated by location - even car washes will have slightly different prices and services. (Even branding alone is a differentiator). But also the political section could not be further from the current climate: > Especially true in the American two-party system, political parties want to maximize vote allocated to their candidate. Political parties will adjust their platform to comply with the median voters’ demand. The Comparative Midpoints Model represents this idea best: Both political parties will get as close to the competing party’s platform while preserving its own identity
codethatwerks 3y ago
X axis drug usage (street value), Y axis (number of car washes)
throwup238 3y ago
I think they're popular because they create induced demand. Most people only seek out car washes once they reach a certain dirtiness threshold but if the car wash is on the way home or at their favorite gas station, they tend to wash their cars much more frequently. There's four car washes within a half mile radius of my house that have been around for years but each of them is on a different artery connecting to the freeway so they cater to different markets so to speak. The area could probably support few more if the real estate weren't so competitive. IMO that's also why they all have monthly memberships with unlimited washes. The vast majority of their customers are regulars driving by on their way to work so the subscription makes sense for everyone.
pseingatl 3y ago
Self-storage facilities, car washes, all sold on the grail of near-passive income. With a dying manufacturing base, at least it's better than selling hamburgers to each other. God I love this country.
- WoahNoun 3y ago
  US manufacturing output is at an all time high. It just requires less employees to produce due to automation.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
With vacations so expensive we bring the kids to car washes as rides, they love it!
KingMachiavelli 3y ago
I really hate sounding like a broken record but this is just another instance of how low property taxes and the absence of land value taxes massively benefits low-value businesses. The real business of car washes is real estate, it's profitable enough to get 3-4x leverage with a low interest loan. TBH I think real estate used to have high information asymmetry between local residents and large investors; low property taxes and generous loan terms under this primarily benefited small businesses, individuals, etc. I think the internet and increased observability into far away projects erased this (a ring camera costs a billion dollar PE firm and Single home owner the same); now the same policies we have had are allowing easy arbitrage between low cost fed/PE cash and predictable "dumb" business categories; car wash, self storage, etc. I take pride in the fact I haven't been to a car wash in probably 3 years and have likely gone myself less than 10 times total. Rain and the occasional wet rag is good enough for a depreciating asset.
- thatguy0900 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you live in a high snow area? I wash my car pretty regularly once the road salt starts coming out, most car washes here do some manner of undercoat to help with the salt rust.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  When you see a solution here of higher property taxes, is it focused on the raw land value or on the value of "improvements?" I've never been a fan of taxing the value of raw land, mainly because it creates incentives for destroying natural land and extracting as much value as possible from the space. Taxing structures based on the expected economic value can make sense, though even then if its a business there are more direct ways to tax the business's realized revenue or profits.
  - mdasen 3y ago
    Land value taxes aren't about destroying natural land to extract value. The point of taxing the value of the land in urban areas is that a lot of the time places essentially squat on land that could be better used. A car wash building will have a low assessed value for its improvements compared to a biotech building. For example, in my city we have a carwash with its improvements valued at $400,000 and a biotech building with its improvements valued at $275,000,000. The biotech building uses only double the land, but pays a ton more taxes. In my city, there are lots where they're basically abandoned. The owners know that they can just sit on the land and it'll increase in value over time even if it isn't used for a productive purpose. During this time, people need housing, businesses need office space, etc. This isn't "natural land", they're gravel pits. In fact, lack of a land value tax causes us to destroy natural land. Instead of using land well, we sprawl and pave our way into the suburbs and beyond. Not all land is equally valuable and land can be made non-valuable from the standpoint of a land value tax like parks and nature reserves. A land value tax isn't really meaningful in rural areas where the land isn't really that valuable due to its location. Where a land value tax is meaningful is in cities where land is scarce and we want to put it to good use. In a city, we don't want someone keeping an empty lot for decades so they can become richer based off the hard work of others around them - productive investors creating housing and office space, workers and artists making an area more desirable, etc. They sit on their empty lot paying nothing in taxes while others make them richer. A land value tax says: put that land to good use or your investment won't pay off that well. Under the current system based on improvements, they pay almost nothing and leech off the hard work of everyone else. Land value taxes don't destroy natural land. They'd probably preserve it. A land value tax might destroy surface parking lots in dense cities, but that isn't "natural land". They're a poor use of space. I live in one of the densest cities in the US and around the corner from a lot of 1-story retail. It would be better for the community if that retail had housing on top and a land value tax would encourage that. The alternative to encouraging good land use is having sprawl. Sprawl doesn't preserve natural land, it destroys it. It also destroys our climate with the carbon emissions from people who then drive everywhere. A land value tax isn't about taxing all land equally across the US. If you have land in an area where land is plentiful, then it doesn't have a high value (because it's plentiful) and it doesn't need to have a lot of value extracted from it. If you buy land in Manhattan, Boston, etc. and decide that you like it as an abandoned piece of property, that's not good for the community and there should be pressure on you to put it to better use or sell it to someone who will put it to good use. A land value tax is about taxing land in a way that prevents someone profiting off squatting on land.
godelski 3y ago
How does an article like this not mention that if you rent you probably don't have a water spigot and area you can wash your own car. I'm not saying this is causal, but it seems like a reasonable question that I'd want addressed. Is it related? Bloomberg has not previously been shy about discussing the decreasing rate of home ownership and renting.
- lolinder 3y ago
  What decreasing rate of home ownership? Nationwide the rate was only ever higher during the housing bubble [0], and the Midwest specifically (which is where this town is located) tends to have the highest affordability in the country [1]. There are certain areas in the country that are struggling with low housing affordability and high rates of renters, but that can't explain excess car washes in the Midwest. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N [1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp8fcxs1hjrc91.png https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp...
- hansvm 3y ago
  Actually, why don't apartments offer a spigot and outlet somewhere nearby where you can park a car? In my mind, it's kind of like how above $20/hr or so (and >= 5ish employees), it's a no-brainer for businesses to pay for lunch. It's more cost effective for the business to pay, and it results in less dead time and more camaraderie. The experience of automatic or manual car washes is bad; your car doesn't get that clean; it's shockingly expensive for what you get; you don't have the proper tools/time to clean the interior or wax and dry the outside; you have a variety of quickly deprecating fake-currency scams (where the unit costs are a prime number not dividing the amounts you're allowed to use to pay for the fake currency, and the fake coins only sometimes work in the machines and are replaced every 2yrs or so to deprecate anything you may have bought in the past); and so on. Like, I average $5/mo or so cleaning the cars in my household. Doing it at my apartment with my own tools would be a strictly better experience. Most tenants I've talked to agree. In our complex, that's a (ballpark) >=$12k/yr opportunity. Is it that expensive to place a spigot and outlet close to a private road? Have bad actors made this infeasible? What actually keeps landlords from providing that amenity?
dbrueck 3y ago
I wash my car annually, whether it needs it or not!
resolutebat 3y ago
How can car washes in the US still go for $10 in these inflationary times, or a fraction of that with a subscription? Here in Australia you're generally looking at A$25 and up ($17-ish at current exchange rates, more until recently).
- bombcar 3y ago
  Because after paying for the equipment and maintenance, the marginal cost of the wash is whatever soap it uses, the electricity, and a few gallons of water (with a recycling car wash). Selling a teaspoon of soap and 4 gallons of water for $10 is a darn good deal. And if you're already paying all the fixed costs, you want to sell as many as you can.
Animats 3y ago
In the UK, it's a common immigration scam.[1] [1] https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/crime/nine-people-arrested-during-car-wash-visits-for-operation-bubbles-in-doncaster-investigating-modern-slavery-4336744 https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/crime/nine-people-...
Lammy 3y ago
> Such “destination” facilities can offer […] electric vehicle charging This seems like the most likely reason to me. It's a way to hold on to land in a way that normalizes gas-station-like traffic patterns without the "gas station" stigma. They can be easily converted in the future once electric cars are a large enough percentage of cars that everyone will come to accept fueling as a 30-minute activity instead of a 30-second activity. If they tried to just buy land and keep it empty they would have a hell of a time convincing NIMBY types to tolerate the introduction of charger traffic patterns where none existed in the meantime.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Possibly, and carwash and charging are value add to the consumer. If you wash your car for 5 minutes after your weekly 30 minute super charge, and before or after every long trip, you're going to have a nice looking car.
- UncleEntity 3y ago
  IDK, I used to drive all over the Phoenix valley pre-covid in my cab and most of new business construction I would see was either a car wash or coffee shop. I was messing around on google maps one day and there was something crazy like seven starbucks within reasonable walking distance of my apartment including two in the same shopping center. I always thought the car wash construction boom had something to do with water conservation, Phoenix being in the desert, but apparently not.
  - Lammy 3y ago
    Anecdote: I went to a Starbucks just today (in a Tesla!) that had a huge bank of superchargers outside and zero seating inside. I'm sure the beancounters love the idea of everyone using Starbucks as their 30-minute car-fueling-and-now-also-drinks stop. It solves all of the (from the corporate point of view) downsides of running an actual store with, like, chairs and shit. It practically guarantees each "seat" turns over in that amount of time since the act of showing up to use the charger implies they have somewhere else to be. Nobody's sat there for hours on their laptop. No problematic h̵o̵m̵e̵l̵e̵s̵s̵ ̵h̵o̵u̵s̵e̵l̵e̵s̵s̵ unhoused people shooting up in the restroom unless they happen to be living out of an $80000 car. Corporate wet dream lol
1970-01-01 3y ago
I don't know why there are suddenly so many, but I do know that a large majority of them are a complete waste of time and money. Only use a car wash if they have filtered water -or- you have salt on your vehicle (i.e. driving on salted winter roads). Paying for anything else is a large waste of money, as your car will still look dirty when it dries. Yes, that under spray is the most important part of the wash if you are driving on salted roads. Don't skip it.
laughing_man 3y ago
A whole article that doesn't touch on the real reason there are so many car washes, laundromats, and nail salons. It's because the cars aren't the only thing being cleaned. If you have a lot of illicit cash that needs to wind up in your bank account, these are the kinds of places you need to own.
- ks2048 3y ago
  I thought part of it was that these are things that can't be replaced with online shopping.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Most of the new automated chains are cashless
Turing_Machine 3y ago
This kind of thing has been around for a long time. The classic method was to build a trailer park or a drive-in theater. You could keep steady cash coming in until you were ready to build something more substantial, then simply evict the trailer owners (space rent was typically month-to-month) or tear down the movie screen and grade the parking lot flat, in both cases with very little demo cost. Trailer parks and drive-in theaters were both way bigger than car washes. These guys are pikers.
coldtea 3y ago
Perhaps inspired by a certain TV series championing science and working class teachers?
devit 3y ago
According to several sources, car washes seem highly likely to damage the car, and are also usually unnecessary (the car works fine even if dirty, unless visibility is seriously impaired, and eventually it rains and the rain automatically washes the car if you park it outside). Probably a lot of people are conditioned that they need to have a clean car.
- sixothree 3y ago
  I'm 100% convinced they also coat the car with something that is dust attracting.
jen_h 3y ago
I live in Florida, where these subscription-only car washes proliferate like kudzu; they’ve crowded out the good old gas station stalwarts that you might or might not get stuck in for several years now. And the cause for their spread has been widely and publicly known for years: somebody found out that these things print cash. You own the land, you pay for one or two employees on-site max. Once PE woke up to the “strategy,” it was game on. PE gets excited and overdoes it, wealth extraction hearkens enshittification, corner car washes are the new dollar store. So I almost didn’t read past the subtitle, what’s actually new here? Oh: “The omnipresence of the car wash in American life may be underappreciated: There are twice as many car wash outlets as McDonald’s and Starbucks locations combined.” That’s almost unbelievable. Twice as many as McDonalds+Starbucks! (Another concern: Who’s on the hook for all the PFAS cleanups when the scheme goes bust? Because you know it won’t be PE.)
- bombcar 3y ago
  McDonalds + Starbucks is a weird connection. You'd think the first thing to compare them to would be number of gas stations ... 186,000 gas stations vs 60,000 car washes. And a quick sanity check of my town - we have more gas stations than car washes (though some have car washes) and way more burger joints than car washes, and also more coffee shops than car washes.
thekevan 3y ago
Maybe they all watched Breaking Bad and think they can use it to launder money.
speakfreely 3y ago
The answer is private equity "roll-up" strategies of "boring businesses". You're going to see this accelerate in tons of other things that PE thinks can be easily consolidated, the gold rush has already started for dental practices, primary care providers, coin laundry, HVAC companies, landscaping, etc. American small businesses are disappearing because that's what consumers want (what they vote for with their dollars, as opposed to what they say in polls).
- etc-hosts 3y ago
  Veterinary care choices are simultaneously shrinking and skyrocketing in price.
  - supportengineer 3y ago
    Ours turned into a subscription service.
- cokeandpepsi 3y ago
  [dead]
- derbOac 3y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily what consumers want. Sometimes it's what business owners want (eg when they retire and sell), and consolidation gives the new owner the benefit of local monopoly or decreased competiton. Absolutely no one in my area likes trends in veterinary care, for example, but there are only so many options.
  - TecoAndJix 3y ago
    What are some of the negative trends you are seeing in veterinary care?
- donedeals 3y ago
  PCP and dental practices are much harder to roll up. The doctors start a competitor, and bring their patients, the second the non-compete ends wiping the practice that was bought
conductr 3y ago
Have they actually increased though or just replacing the “laser wash” that almost every gas station uses to have and everyone thought was crappy. I see those mostly boarded up as out of service now. I definitely don’t see as many full service options as I used to but undocumented workers in Texas are commanding the most pay they’ve ever been able to the last decade or so.
hereme888 3y ago
I thought it was odd to see so many pop up in my small town. They're really "bling" and damage the small town peaceful look. It's really an eye-sore and wasted space. My car washing consists of occasional use of the gas station scrubber.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
I don't understand why we can't just let the market decide which businesses make sense based on their revenue vs. leasing the land. Presumably if car washes are so profitable it's because consumers want to use them, so why are we artificially restricting their expansion? It also provides a free subsidy to existing car washes who get to charge higher prices than they would in a competitive market. Restrictions to entering trade generally hurt consumers. FWIW, I've used a paid car wash <10x in my life so it doesn't matter that much to me.
- avidiax 3y ago
  Imagine, for a moment, an even freer market. Someone opens a car wash in a central area. They self-declare a tax value for the land and its improvements. We also allow that anyone can forcibly buy that land by paying that same self-declared tax value + X%. The sale can't be blocked. We've ended the monopoly of land ownership, and imposed a free market on land purchasing. Car washes that are a waste of the land they are placed on will get bought out and converted to other uses. If they are not, they will remain. This, by the way, is very close to a land value tax, and all we've done is force a fair appraisal of potential value for a parcel, rather than the current, possibly underutilized value.
  - NegativeK 3y ago
    Forcing the sale of private property to anyone who can fork up the cash sounds absolutely ripe for abuse.
    - avidiax 3y ago
      Yes, real life is always more complicated. It would be necessary to block sales of a personal or vindictive nature, so the local rich guy can't force their enemies out of their homes. And have robust antitrust. And correct the perverse incentive towards poison pills, such as polluting the land to make it undesirable.
      - bombcar 3y ago
Haemm0r 3y ago
They watched Breaking Bad too much :-)
forgotpassword2 3y ago
Will it really be like the coffee market? I don't think so. Gen Z has the least intent to buy properties, buy cars, how will cars washes sustain in the future?
- fragmede 3y ago
  Is it intent or financial? If I couldn’t afford something, i can see myself, not bothering to try.
billforsternz 3y ago
I don't get the hostility to car washes. I've owned cars for 40 years and I'm pretty sure I've never hand washed one once. Life's too short. I like and need car washes.
sydbarrett74 3y ago
Henry George FTW.
TheBlight 3y ago
Cartels laundering money.
lencastre 3y ago
Subscription model car washing, saved you a click.
light_hue_1 3y ago
It's not just car washes. So many small towns are just gutted by bank branches. Beautiful historic downtowns that used to host shops and restaurants, half of which are banks now.
orojackson 3y ago
I'm surprised no one here has mentioned rinseless washes like Optimum No Rinse (ONR) as an option for washing your car. You dilute it with water in a 1:256 solution in a bucket, and then you use a slightly-dripping microfiber towel or a rinseless-wash-specific sponge to clean your car. The rinseless wash itself acts as its own drying aid, so you can wipe your car dry with a microfiber drying towel afterwards without having to rinse off the car (hence the term rinseless). I would say this is the cheapest, simplest, and (arguably) safest way to wash your car, especially if you buy the rinseless wash concentrate by the gallon. It's easy enough that it allows me to wash my car nearly every week. I only need about 3 gallons of water and 1.5 fluid ounces of ONR to fully wash one car.
higeorge13 3y ago
It’s funny that in Greece we have a similar situation with take away coffee places. There are just too many almost on every corner. And to make it relevant to the article, the last couple years people open coffee-hybrid businesses, like barber+cafe, car wash+cafe, and so on. :-)
globular-toast 3y ago
People still use automatic car washes in the US? They've almost completely disappeared in the UK. I've never used one in my life. We have hand car washes and self-service car washes instead (a jet wash). I thought it was well known the automatic ones ruined your paint work.
icar 3y ago
Well, I remember a story about a car wash that could explain why someone would want to own one...
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  chemistry teachers' salary is too low?
ufocia 3y ago
Breaking Bad made car washes a cultural icon. Perhaps people want to launder money or be as cool as Heisenberg/Walter White.
bombcar 3y ago
> Unlike stores, restaurants or other businesses, most self-service car washes don’t pay sales taxes to their host communities. Then why don't they? It seems a taxable event has occurred, so tax it? Maybe the current regulations count it as something else, so it has no sales tax.
0n0n0m0uz 3y ago
Interesting, I have had this conversation many times about Montrose, Colorado. There are more car washes there in terms of its size than any place I have ever been and there are more under construction.
diogenescynic 3y ago
The article doesn't mention it, but I read another article about car washes that argued they're used as a way to speculate on commercial real estate in cities because the car washes provide just enough revenue to pay for the purchase of the land and property taxes. Then when the land becomes valuable they can sell it to another developer.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The most famous of those is parking lots. I'm not sure car washes are the same, because a car wash is way more expensive than paving a lot.
- malfist 3y ago
  Just like storage units?
  - diogenescynic 3y ago
    Absolutely. I can think of a few storage units that are in prime real estate locations that make no sense--like right across the street from Oracle Park in San Francisco. Has to be some of the most expensive real estate in the entire city/state and it's being used for storage units...
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      Could that land have toxic soil, and therefore not be zoned for anything else?
      - Solvency 3y ago
        When in doubted the answer is always "because something is utterly fucked in that zone" and done by humans.
        renewiltord 3y ago
        In SF, the answer is always "because the neighbours complained".
polonbike 3y ago
Did the serie Breaking Bad inspire a trend, showing a seemingly innocent/efficient way to clean money ?
- Plasmoid 3y ago
  From what I've heard the current way to clean cash is to buy gift cards and then use them to buy items from Amazon/Steam. Sure, the store fronts take a cut but having a 1099 from Valve looks way more legitimate than reporting thousands of dollars of cash.
  - notdang 3y ago
    So how do you clean them with this scheme? By registering a game on Steam or selling something on Amazon? Also made me think why in the country I live, in stores like 7Eleven you cannot pay with a credit card for gift cards, google pay cards, etc.
    - Plasmoid 3y ago
      From what I understand the scheme works like this. Create a very basic "game" that technically meets Valve's requirements. As long as it runs well enough then it won't be blocked. Have people buy Steam gift cards with cash, then buy the games you have published. Valve takes 30% and you get a nice check with a verified source of funds from a legitimate company.
- diggan 3y ago
  Unlikely, the meme of using car washing places for washing money has been around for longer than the tv show.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  The show was written in eary 2000s - I seriously doubt many people pay cash anymore
  - jjulius 3y ago
bluefirebrand 3y ago
In my city you're not allowed to wash your car in your driveway I guess it's too hard on the storm drains to have soap and dirt and stuff going down them Or maybe city council is just in some kind of racket with car wash owners or something But either way, that's why we have so many car washes here... And it sucks ass
- nunez 3y ago
  You'll never need to worry about this if you try using Optimum No Rinse waterless wash. It cleans and details your entire car with 2.5gal of water. I've been using thus for over two years now and will not wash our cars any other way.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  This is interesting, what you mention. In the northern foothills here bordering Phoenix, Arizona, to the north, there are an understandable number of automated carwashes. However, i've found no manual (pressure wash sort) carwashes, which are easy to find in California and Illinois, for two examples. I don't know why this is.
  - anotheruser13 3y ago
    In Chicago, it's always good to rinse the salt off your car to prevent rust. I recall doing this several times during many winters there. Never had a problem with rust on any car I owned.
  - ohmyiv 3y ago
    Could it be that single family homeownership is higher there? I can kind of speak for some of L.A.'s use of manual car washes. There's many who live in apartments or places that don't have places to wash at home. Manual car washes fill the void for people that want to clean their own car but don't have space.
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      it might be. It might also be a water conservation thing, somehow, but I can't see how that would work unless they filter the water used in teh carwashes that are automatic and reuse them in some way not feasible with the power-wash-for-quarters sorts of stalls.
babas 3y ago
I've been thinking about this same phenomenon. I reside in Norway, where, interestingly, five different car washes opened in 2023 within a 2 km radius of my local neighborhood. Remarkably, four of these are clustered within a 300m stretch inside a commercial park. Our local area has a population of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 people. Each car wash is operated by a different entity, offering unique apps and subscription plans. It's hard to imagine this being profitable given the circumstances. But what do I know, I wash my own car.
- eastbound 3y ago
  Everyone wants to be a remote entrepreneur passive income digital nomad.
- myself248 3y ago
  ...did you say 'apps'?
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    There is one by me that lets you pay wirelessly with an app. They have an unlimited wash subscription plan you can only get with that. I am not really sure how it works (bluetooth?) but I guess it would speed things up. I would try it to puzzle it out, but its one of those spinnybrush antenna destroyers and I'm not gonna risk it.
  - compootr 3y ago
    I hate the trend that everything must be an app
    - walthamstow 3y ago
      Honestly I bought freezer food bags recently and even they had a bloody app. Each one is stamped with a QR code and you can use the app to record what's in each one. Absolutely bizarre. I continue to use a Sharpie.
nytesky 3y ago
I would have assumed its from the rise of gig workers using private cars. Uber/Lyft need to keep cars pretty clean to not be dinged stars, and even package and food delivery can create more mess which may require cleaning (but mostly taxi service I think). I skimmed the article and don’t see mention of that?
- elwell 3y ago
  But if I can avoid buying a car because Uber, then number of washes goes down or is at least balanced.
  - williamdclt 3y ago
    In London at least, Uber is an alternative to public transport (and taxis obv), not to car ownership
    - cassianoleal 3y ago
      Both public transport and taxi/cab/uber are alternatives to car ownership.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        Unless you are rich taxi/uber is not an alternative to car ownership. (rich call it a limo). Those are alternatives for when something else covers most of your needs but once in a while it is lacking. If you own a car you need a 'i'm drunk' option. If you take transit you need a 'i'm going where transit doesn't or is too slow' option.
        cassianoleal 3y ago
        You're not wrong but my point stands. I'm not saying taking an uber everywhere is an alternative to having a car. It's part of the system. There's public transport (tube, DLR, overground, trams, busses), there's rental bikes, rental scooters, there's uber/taxi, there's walking. You use the "car ownership alternative" (or a combination of them) that works for each given situation.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Year after Year, I kept thinking this was a fad and would crash. But years go by, and now they are calling it a 'boom'. 14 billion dollar market. For Car Washes? Isn't this an indicator that economy is fine, people are fine, since they can spend this type of money on car washes? How can something this worthless be booming, if people are struggling.
- diogenescynic 3y ago
  My local car was has a $20/month subscription for unlimited washes. These aren't exactly luxury services--they're priced similar to a Netflix plan. If you have a car, it's worth it if you value our time at all.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lowkj 3y ago
    But if you value your time, why would you wash your car multiple times per month?
    - greedo 3y ago
      It takes roughly five minutes depending on how long the queue is, so when I'm out running errands I'll stop in. Keeps the road crud (and most importantly, salt) off the car so it lasts longer.
    - phillc73 3y ago
      That's perfect. I do not wash my car, because I value my time. I thought I was just lazy!
      - Ekaros 3y ago
        It is so simple to come up with excuses. It is raining. No need to go. We are in spring and here it means the dirty season, no need to go. Or it is negative temperature outside, it probably does not dry...
jnwatson 3y ago
In Houston and Dallas 30 years ago these were common. When I moved to the East coast 20 years ago I was surprised it wasn't a thing here. The first Flagship car wash arrived 10 years ago, and they are always busy. Still, how many can a town support?
socar 3y ago
Money Laundering, rings a bell ?
- diogenescynic 3y ago
  I thought that was what all the mattress stores were for.
  - xenospn 3y ago
    Mattress stores and Psychics. Seriously, there’s thousands of both all across the United States - and I’ve never seen anyone set foot in either.
    - popcalc 3y ago
      Psychics are lucrative. They prey on people in the most desperate times of their life and often make off with their life savings. That's why there's one right next to the Louboutin store in Beverly Hills.
- AmVess 3y ago
  Hard to do since most of these are credit card only now. They are popping up because it is good, mostly passive income if you are in the right area.
  - nix0n 3y ago
    "Credit card only" is a sure sign of money laundering: it's a way to game the cash vs credit ratio. (Edit: maybe "sure sign" is a little bit hasty, but I think the other possible reasons for a "credit card only" sign are actually worse morally than money laundering)
    - j16sdiz 3y ago
      "Credit card only" meant everything have paper trail. Maybe some tax avoidance scheme, not money laundering.
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
Not joking, Ivy League graduates who might have went into finance, have started raising capital and funding small cash returning businesses. It is now seen as a legitimate career path, sometimes called a "search fund". An HBS graduate might aspire to buy and run a blue collar business as a way to understand the market. There are private equity funds that might aquire 50 of these businesses at 2-5M each, roll them into an index, and sell the index. Same with doctors/dentist practices. The financing of these businesses is so opaque.
- philip1209 3y ago
  Yeah, "Entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA)", is something I've seen a lot of MBAs study and prioritize. Is it really entrepreneurship though? Seems like "Buy, squeeze, rinse, and repeat" - which is killing businesses rather than creating them.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
    Its not that much different from raising 10M (with nothing but an idea) to build some generic type of software that already has a market. A big secret, raising huge amounts of capital to be an "Entrepreneur", isnt really Entrepreneurship, its being placed into a management position of executing on an already existing (usually proven) idea. VCs certainly see it this way, and so do the pedigreed people they fund. The only people thinking its different, are the ones on the outside looking in.
jameskilton 3y ago
In my area, the home of Tommy Car Wash[1], they are explicitly testing out how many car washes in a city are sustainable given a certain population size, so yeah we (Holland, MI) are surrounded by them. [1] https://tommycarwash.com/ https://tommycarwash.com/
Solvency 3y ago
Why so many car washes? Why are there so many cars? Because our country is ultimately designed and developed by urban sprawl madmen with a highway fetish and zero vision for a better way for humans to live and operate. I love how we hyper fixate on stupid questions about car washes while pretending like car dependency isn't the problem.
- elwell 3y ago
  Do you think it's that orchestrated? I think it's more: evolution / chaos / emergent behavior.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Some of each. There are people opposing efforts to make things better. However there also is a lot that ever step makes things better for someone in particular who thus cares more than the more generic society that got worse.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    The moves to the suburbs was orchestrated. The moves to newer suburbs from the existing ones was orchestrated. The encouragement of driving everywhere was orchestrated. Not to cause us to need more car washes. But it was by design.
Bjorkbat 3y ago
Huh, this whole time I thought they were just a way to launder money from selling meth
SkyPuncher 3y ago
I have actually briefly considered opening a car wash. They seem like just about one of the easiest businesses to run. Minimal employees, low variable costs, likely a reasonable long term investment in the actual rental estate. In many ways, this the same as gas stations, convenience stores, and CVS/rite-aid/walgreens. People don’t want to go out if their way.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  That might actually be part of it. If you go to YouTube, things like laundromats, vending machines and CAR WASHES are pretty big with the passive income "movement". We're seeing more car washes opening up around here, but I think that is just as much about having the area under services for ages. Now I don't have to wait in line for 45 minutes, or risk a fine for cleaning my car in the drive way (which I don't think you should be doing anyway).
- fragmede 3y ago
  more importantly, after the switch to EVs, you're still gonna need car washes. Gas stations, not so much.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    My guess is the gas stations will have car washes attached to them (as some already do). I suspect some of this all is them being "sold" and in a few years a bunch will be gone, unable to make the payments on the loans taken.
samsk 3y ago
Ouch, just remembered I've missed my regular yearly car wash. Don't tell I should do such a unnecessary and time consuming thing more often.
elwell 3y ago
Because every year we're more so too lazy/busy for physical work. Not judging that, just observing.
avidphantasm 3y ago
[flagged]
neonate 3y ago
https://archive.ph/Umqn3 https://archive.ph/Umqn3
bee_rider 3y ago
1) Who is spending $20 a month on car washes? 2) If the problem is that subscription users aren’t paying local sales taxes, why not charge property taxes? (or, Land Value Tax!)
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  $20 is 2 car washes. Around here moo moo car wash chain is all over and you cat get unlimited washes for like $30/month. Anywhere there is a moo-moo’s there is also a line of cars. Some people get obsessed with keeping their cars squeaky clean here.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    $30/month to wait in a line. Fun times we live in.
    - lotsoweiners 3y ago
      Why assume there is a line? I spent like $1500 just for the tickets twice last year to take my family of 4 to Disneyland which is mostly standing in line.
      - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        Surely Disneyland is more fun than a car wash
        bombcar 3y ago
        If you take the kids to the car wash when they're small enough, you can tell them it's Disneyland.
- sheepybloke 3y ago
  You end up spending that much if you live in a winter climate. Salt is really bad for cars, so you end up washing a time or two a month generally.
logifail 3y ago
> There are four full-service car washes in town, with a fifth on the way; three are bunched up on a mile-and-a-half stretch of Route 14. Social media complaints about car wash overkill spurred town leaders to take action. Four (or even five) doesn't sound that much? What's the actual problem here? How is a local politican supposed to determine what is the correct density of any particular type of service within her juristidiction? Assuming all other laws and ordinances are being complied with, and that there is no actual "nuisance", why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? Last night I stayed at a hotel very close to London Heathrow Airport. There, on the Bath Road, there are (literally) dozens of hotels, one right next to another. This is a feature not a bug! Apparently, there is lots of demand for hotels at that location, which isn't exactly a surprise. If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right?
- hobobaggins 3y ago
  Also helps keep prices in line. Perhaps a local car wash owner wants to maintain their monopoly (that was actually alluded to, but not greatly discussed, in the article!)
- beejiu 3y ago
  Yep, businesses naturally cluster like this. It's called Hotelling's Law: https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/ https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/
  - boringg 3y ago
    You should see how Hanoi businesses used to cluster
  - bandyaboot 3y ago
    > Especially true in the American two-party system, political parties want to maximize vote allocated to their candidate. Political parties will adjust their platform to comply with the median voters’ demand. The Comparative Midpoints Model represents this idea best: Both political parties will get as close to the competing party’s platform while preserving its own identity. On the contrary, the ever increasing dysfunction in US politics is largely because the players have hacked their way past the constraints of this model.
tonetheman 3y ago
[dead]
brevitea 3y ago
Money Laundering.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  Or real-estate shenanigans, for that matter. It makes me think of Mattress Firm having locations less than a mile from one another.
- cush 3y ago
  Walter White is dead. More likely that most people with cars no longer own driveways and car washes have been completely automated, so they’ve become a good, economical choice over the years. It’s a lucrative business now. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/car-washes/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/car-washes/
sroussey 3y ago
There is a federal write off for car washes, so no real surprise. https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cost-segregation-for-car-washes/ https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cos...
- hobobaggins 3y ago
  Depreciation is available for any company that purchases equipment; the "unique" thing as described in that article is simply that most of the value for car washes is in the equipment, so depreciation strategies are very important, but any business can and should write off equipment, or any other expense against net profits.
  - dr-detroit 3y ago
    [dead]
  - sroussey 3y ago
    Oh, sorry I thought the article had more detail. There is an accelerated depreciate for car washes that runs out in 2026 I think.
    - sroussey 3y ago
      Here is a better article: https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cost-segregation-for-car-washes/ https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cos... > The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 made a significant change in this area, currently allowing businesses to write off 80% of the cost of qualifying property in the year it's placed in service Why depreciate over 39 years when you can do 80% in one year.
      - gunapologist99 3y ago
        Same article, right? And there's nothing in there to do with car washes specifically, though? Just general MACRS etc?
Antip0dean 3y ago
This is a big thing in the UK, too. The official narrative here is modern slavery with undocumented migrants. It's the same with sex work, with which is harder to separate between conservative propaganda and reality. I expect the main difference between the US and UK versions are that the latter are typically set up in disused urban plots with pop-up tents and temporary chain-link fences rather than having any investment. Either way, if you're getting 3-5 people washing your car for a tenner, the people you're handing you money to are probably receiving minimal pennies on the dollar.
- gotoeleven 3y ago
  Sorry it's conservative propaganda that illegal immigrants will work for very low wages at crappy jobs?
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    > It's the same with sex work, with which is harder to separate between conservative propaganda and reality. No?
    - tom_ 3y ago
      I guess they edited their post, because your quote no longer applies?
      - lolinder 3y ago
        The quote is from the GP.
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    I volunteer at a refugee charity. In my experience people given the right to stay will take whatever work they can get, which is often crappy work at low wages due to lack of transferable skills and/or English (e.g. security guard).
- notso411 3y ago
krupan 3y ago
tl;dr government interference
bell-cot 3y ago
The real cause - a "turn crank, make money" financial model: > But the industry’s biggest recent innovation involves its business model, which has increasingly focused on membership and recurring revenue. ... > Now, washes can take just 90 seconds, labor costs have been automated down, and recurring revenue from memberships has eliminated weather risks. Plus, the tax reforms enacted in 2017 by former president Donald Trump allowed car wash owners to claim 100% depreciation on new equipment — a generous subsidy to further investment. While that incentive was written to shrink over time, the tax proposal currently in Congress would restore the 100% depreciation allowance. ... > In analyzing usage patterns, the industry soon found that the convenience of wash memberships translated to higher profits. A typical non-member may come in three or four times a year, while a typical member gets that many washes each month. But at $20 a month, that’s a huge jump in annual spending — more than enough to cover the costs of accommodating heavy users who may scrub their SUVs dozens of times a month. SO - at least where I live, the number of monthly payment/unlimited washes car washes has exploded in recent years. Even so, there's often a line (of very new, very expensive) vehicles waiting at them.
lettergram 3y ago
The cynical me says - easy way to launder money (same with nutrition stores). You don’t have to move much material and you can get large volumes of “sales”
cebert 3y ago
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493919
- bell-cot 3y ago
  True. But that's the same article, with 0-ish comments - so no value here.
smeej 3y ago
Automated ones are fine, but what I've really missed since I moved to New England have been the ones where a team vacuums the inside, hoses off your mats, wipes your windows and dashboard inside, etc. Growing up in the West and Midwest, these things were absolutely normal for the first 30 years of my life. Some of them would even change the oil too. But I haven't found anywhere within 50 miles of me that will do it here. I'm not talking "detailing." This was $35 including the oil.
- liquidpele 3y ago
  One near us does this. It’s like $100 now though.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  I've lived in TX and FL and these types of services are everywhere. Even many of the automated carwashes where you vacuum your own car after the wash will usually charge an extra fee if you want the inside cleaned by staff.
- subpixel 3y ago
  These are still normal where undocumented workers are willing to hustle for low pay and tips. In Queens I got a hand wash and interior detail for less than $50. Where I live now $225.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Labor costs arr too high for this to exist anymore.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    That may depend on region. These still exist in the suburbs outside Birmingham, AL. Last I saw the prices varied from $15-30 for a wash, wax, detail, and hand dry. They don't offer an oil change though, I've never seen a wash+detail+oil change in the area. At scale I'd assume they could do it for closer to $50, if $35 was a 2005 price that's on par with inflation and beating inflation for some industries like food.
nobodywillobsrv 3y ago
M O N E Y L A U N D E R I N G

234 points by philip1209 3y ago

> The industry’s growing footprint has not gone unnoticed. Complaints have erupted about traffic tie-ups, noise and chemical odors around locations, among other issues... City leaders have a limited number of car wash countermeasures at their disposal, such as withholding special use permits and enacting zoning changes to limit new locations. A nice summary of why things don't get fixed. There are legitimate problems with car washes: traffic tie ups, pollution. Instead of regulating to fix those problems, they regulate to limit the number of locations instead. So, the demand that exists isn't met, and nothing gets better because the existing businesses can continue being nuisances just like always.

beejiu 3y ago

> There are four full-service car washes in town, with a fifth on the way; three are bunched up on a mile-and-a-half stretch of Route 14. There's actually a game theory explantation for this called Hotelling's Law: https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/ https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/

soared 3y ago
Pretty interesting read but seemingly doesn’t hold super well in some real world situations. Extremely few goods have Inelastic demand and are purely differentiated by location - even car washes will have slightly different prices and services. (Even branding alone is a differentiator). But also the political section could not be further from the current climate: > Especially true in the American two-party system, political parties want to maximize vote allocated to their candidate. Political parties will adjust their platform to comply with the median voters’ demand. The Comparative Midpoints Model represents this idea best: Both political parties will get as close to the competing party’s platform while preserving its own identity

codethatwerks 3y ago

X axis drug usage (street value), Y axis (number of car washes)

throwup238 3y ago

I think they're popular because they create induced demand. Most people only seek out car washes once they reach a certain dirtiness threshold but if the car wash is on the way home or at their favorite gas station, they tend to wash their cars much more frequently. There's four car washes within a half mile radius of my house that have been around for years but each of them is on a different artery connecting to the freeway so they cater to different markets so to speak. The area could probably support few more if the real estate weren't so competitive. IMO that's also why they all have monthly memberships with unlimited washes. The vast majority of their customers are regulars driving by on their way to work so the subscription makes sense for everyone.

pseingatl 3y ago

Self-storage facilities, car washes, all sold on the grail of near-passive income. With a dying manufacturing base, at least it's better than selling hamburgers to each other. God I love this country.

WoahNoun 3y ago
US manufacturing output is at an all time high. It just requires less employees to produce due to automation.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

With vacations so expensive we bring the kids to car washes as rides, they love it!

KingMachiavelli 3y ago

I really hate sounding like a broken record but this is just another instance of how low property taxes and the absence of land value taxes massively benefits low-value businesses. The real business of car washes is real estate, it's profitable enough to get 3-4x leverage with a low interest loan. TBH I think real estate used to have high information asymmetry between local residents and large investors; low property taxes and generous loan terms under this primarily benefited small businesses, individuals, etc. I think the internet and increased observability into far away projects erased this (a ring camera costs a billion dollar PE firm and Single home owner the same); now the same policies we have had are allowing easy arbitrage between low cost fed/PE cash and predictable "dumb" business categories; car wash, self storage, etc. I take pride in the fact I haven't been to a car wash in probably 3 years and have likely gone myself less than 10 times total. Rain and the occasional wet rag is good enough for a depreciating asset.

thatguy0900 3y ago
Out of curiosity, do you live in a high snow area? I wash my car pretty regularly once the road salt starts coming out, most car washes here do some manner of undercoat to help with the salt rust.
_heimdall 3y ago
When you see a solution here of higher property taxes, is it focused on the raw land value or on the value of "improvements?" I've never been a fan of taxing the value of raw land, mainly because it creates incentives for destroying natural land and extracting as much value as possible from the space. Taxing structures based on the expected economic value can make sense, though even then if its a business there are more direct ways to tax the business's realized revenue or profits.
- mdasen 3y ago
  Land value taxes aren't about destroying natural land to extract value. The point of taxing the value of the land in urban areas is that a lot of the time places essentially squat on land that could be better used. A car wash building will have a low assessed value for its improvements compared to a biotech building. For example, in my city we have a carwash with its improvements valued at $400,000 and a biotech building with its improvements valued at $275,000,000. The biotech building uses only double the land, but pays a ton more taxes. In my city, there are lots where they're basically abandoned. The owners know that they can just sit on the land and it'll increase in value over time even if it isn't used for a productive purpose. During this time, people need housing, businesses need office space, etc. This isn't "natural land", they're gravel pits. In fact, lack of a land value tax causes us to destroy natural land. Instead of using land well, we sprawl and pave our way into the suburbs and beyond. Not all land is equally valuable and land can be made non-valuable from the standpoint of a land value tax like parks and nature reserves. A land value tax isn't really meaningful in rural areas where the land isn't really that valuable due to its location. Where a land value tax is meaningful is in cities where land is scarce and we want to put it to good use. In a city, we don't want someone keeping an empty lot for decades so they can become richer based off the hard work of others around them - productive investors creating housing and office space, workers and artists making an area more desirable, etc. They sit on their empty lot paying nothing in taxes while others make them richer. A land value tax says: put that land to good use or your investment won't pay off that well. Under the current system based on improvements, they pay almost nothing and leech off the hard work of everyone else. Land value taxes don't destroy natural land. They'd probably preserve it. A land value tax might destroy surface parking lots in dense cities, but that isn't "natural land". They're a poor use of space. I live in one of the densest cities in the US and around the corner from a lot of 1-story retail. It would be better for the community if that retail had housing on top and a land value tax would encourage that. The alternative to encouraging good land use is having sprawl. Sprawl doesn't preserve natural land, it destroys it. It also destroys our climate with the carbon emissions from people who then drive everywhere. A land value tax isn't about taxing all land equally across the US. If you have land in an area where land is plentiful, then it doesn't have a high value (because it's plentiful) and it doesn't need to have a lot of value extracted from it. If you buy land in Manhattan, Boston, etc. and decide that you like it as an abandoned piece of property, that's not good for the community and there should be pressure on you to put it to better use or sell it to someone who will put it to good use. A land value tax is about taxing land in a way that prevents someone profiting off squatting on land.

godelski 3y ago

How does an article like this not mention that if you rent you probably don't have a water spigot and area you can wash your own car. I'm not saying this is causal, but it seems like a reasonable question that I'd want addressed. Is it related? Bloomberg has not previously been shy about discussing the decreasing rate of home ownership and renting.

lolinder 3y ago
What decreasing rate of home ownership? Nationwide the rate was only ever higher during the housing bubble [0], and the Midwest specifically (which is where this town is located) tends to have the highest affordability in the country [1]. There are certain areas in the country that are struggling with low housing affordability and high rates of renters, but that can't explain excess car washes in the Midwest. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N [1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp8fcxs1hjrc91.png https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp...
hansvm 3y ago
Actually, why don't apartments offer a spigot and outlet somewhere nearby where you can park a car? In my mind, it's kind of like how above $20/hr or so (and >= 5ish employees), it's a no-brainer for businesses to pay for lunch. It's more cost effective for the business to pay, and it results in less dead time and more camaraderie. The experience of automatic or manual car washes is bad; your car doesn't get that clean; it's shockingly expensive for what you get; you don't have the proper tools/time to clean the interior or wax and dry the outside; you have a variety of quickly deprecating fake-currency scams (where the unit costs are a prime number not dividing the amounts you're allowed to use to pay for the fake currency, and the fake coins only sometimes work in the machines and are replaced every 2yrs or so to deprecate anything you may have bought in the past); and so on. Like, I average $5/mo or so cleaning the cars in my household. Doing it at my apartment with my own tools would be a strictly better experience. Most tenants I've talked to agree. In our complex, that's a (ballpark) >=$12k/yr opportunity. Is it that expensive to place a spigot and outlet close to a private road? Have bad actors made this infeasible? What actually keeps landlords from providing that amenity?

dbrueck 3y ago

I wash my car annually, whether it needs it or not!

resolutebat 3y ago

How can car washes in the US still go for $10 in these inflationary times, or a fraction of that with a subscription? Here in Australia you're generally looking at A$25 and up ($17-ish at current exchange rates, more until recently).

bombcar 3y ago
Because after paying for the equipment and maintenance, the marginal cost of the wash is whatever soap it uses, the electricity, and a few gallons of water (with a recycling car wash). Selling a teaspoon of soap and 4 gallons of water for $10 is a darn good deal. And if you're already paying all the fixed costs, you want to sell as many as you can.

Animats 3y ago

In the UK, it's a common immigration scam.[1] [1] https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/crime/nine-people-arrested-during-car-wash-visits-for-operation-bubbles-in-doncaster-investigating-modern-slavery-4336744 https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/crime/nine-people-...

Lammy 3y ago

> Such “destination” facilities can offer […] electric vehicle charging This seems like the most likely reason to me. It's a way to hold on to land in a way that normalizes gas-station-like traffic patterns without the "gas station" stigma. They can be easily converted in the future once electric cars are a large enough percentage of cars that everyone will come to accept fueling as a 30-minute activity instead of a 30-second activity. If they tried to just buy land and keep it empty they would have a hell of a time convincing NIMBY types to tolerate the introduction of charger traffic patterns where none existed in the meantime.

smileysteve 3y ago
Possibly, and carwash and charging are value add to the consumer. If you wash your car for 5 minutes after your weekly 30 minute super charge, and before or after every long trip, you're going to have a nice looking car.
UncleEntity 3y ago
IDK, I used to drive all over the Phoenix valley pre-covid in my cab and most of new business construction I would see was either a car wash or coffee shop. I was messing around on google maps one day and there was something crazy like seven starbucks within reasonable walking distance of my apartment including two in the same shopping center. I always thought the car wash construction boom had something to do with water conservation, Phoenix being in the desert, but apparently not.
- Lammy 3y ago
  Anecdote: I went to a Starbucks just today (in a Tesla!) that had a huge bank of superchargers outside and zero seating inside. I'm sure the beancounters love the idea of everyone using Starbucks as their 30-minute car-fueling-and-now-also-drinks stop. It solves all of the (from the corporate point of view) downsides of running an actual store with, like, chairs and shit. It practically guarantees each "seat" turns over in that amount of time since the act of showing up to use the charger implies they have somewhere else to be. Nobody's sat there for hours on their laptop. No problematic h̵o̵m̵e̵l̵e̵s̵s̵ ̵h̵o̵u̵s̵e̵l̵e̵s̵s̵ unhoused people shooting up in the restroom unless they happen to be living out of an $80000 car. Corporate wet dream lol

1970-01-01 3y ago

I don't know why there are suddenly so many, but I do know that a large majority of them are a complete waste of time and money. Only use a car wash if they have filtered water -or- you have salt on your vehicle (i.e. driving on salted winter roads). Paying for anything else is a large waste of money, as your car will still look dirty when it dries. Yes, that under spray is the most important part of the wash if you are driving on salted roads. Don't skip it.

laughing_man 3y ago

A whole article that doesn't touch on the real reason there are so many car washes, laundromats, and nail salons. It's because the cars aren't the only thing being cleaned. If you have a lot of illicit cash that needs to wind up in your bank account, these are the kinds of places you need to own.

ks2048 3y ago
I thought part of it was that these are things that can't be replaced with online shopping.
smileysteve 3y ago
Most of the new automated chains are cashless

Turing_Machine 3y ago

This kind of thing has been around for a long time. The classic method was to build a trailer park or a drive-in theater. You could keep steady cash coming in until you were ready to build something more substantial, then simply evict the trailer owners (space rent was typically month-to-month) or tear down the movie screen and grade the parking lot flat, in both cases with very little demo cost. Trailer parks and drive-in theaters were both way bigger than car washes. These guys are pikers.

coldtea 3y ago

Perhaps inspired by a certain TV series championing science and working class teachers?

devit 3y ago

According to several sources, car washes seem highly likely to damage the car, and are also usually unnecessary (the car works fine even if dirty, unless visibility is seriously impaired, and eventually it rains and the rain automatically washes the car if you park it outside). Probably a lot of people are conditioned that they need to have a clean car.

sixothree 3y ago
I'm 100% convinced they also coat the car with something that is dust attracting.

jen_h 3y ago

I live in Florida, where these subscription-only car washes proliferate like kudzu; they’ve crowded out the good old gas station stalwarts that you might or might not get stuck in for several years now. And the cause for their spread has been widely and publicly known for years: somebody found out that these things print cash. You own the land, you pay for one or two employees on-site max. Once PE woke up to the “strategy,” it was game on. PE gets excited and overdoes it, wealth extraction hearkens enshittification, corner car washes are the new dollar store. So I almost didn’t read past the subtitle, what’s actually new here? Oh: “The omnipresence of the car wash in American life may be underappreciated: There are twice as many car wash outlets as McDonald’s and Starbucks locations combined.” That’s almost unbelievable. Twice as many as McDonalds+Starbucks! (Another concern: Who’s on the hook for all the PFAS cleanups when the scheme goes bust? Because you know it won’t be PE.)

bombcar 3y ago
McDonalds + Starbucks is a weird connection. You'd think the first thing to compare them to would be number of gas stations ... 186,000 gas stations vs 60,000 car washes. And a quick sanity check of my town - we have more gas stations than car washes (though some have car washes) and way more burger joints than car washes, and also more coffee shops than car washes.

thekevan 3y ago

Maybe they all watched Breaking Bad and think they can use it to launder money.

speakfreely 3y ago

The answer is private equity "roll-up" strategies of "boring businesses". You're going to see this accelerate in tons of other things that PE thinks can be easily consolidated, the gold rush has already started for dental practices, primary care providers, coin laundry, HVAC companies, landscaping, etc. American small businesses are disappearing because that's what consumers want (what they vote for with their dollars, as opposed to what they say in polls).

etc-hosts 3y ago
Veterinary care choices are simultaneously shrinking and skyrocketing in price.
- supportengineer 3y ago
  Ours turned into a subscription service.
cokeandpepsi 3y ago
[dead]
derbOac 3y ago
I don't think it's necessarily what consumers want. Sometimes it's what business owners want (eg when they retire and sell), and consolidation gives the new owner the benefit of local monopoly or decreased competiton. Absolutely no one in my area likes trends in veterinary care, for example, but there are only so many options.
- TecoAndJix 3y ago
  What are some of the negative trends you are seeing in veterinary care?
donedeals 3y ago
PCP and dental practices are much harder to roll up. The doctors start a competitor, and bring their patients, the second the non-compete ends wiping the practice that was bought

conductr 3y ago

Have they actually increased though or just replacing the “laser wash” that almost every gas station uses to have and everyone thought was crappy. I see those mostly boarded up as out of service now. I definitely don’t see as many full service options as I used to but undocumented workers in Texas are commanding the most pay they’ve ever been able to the last decade or so.

hereme888 3y ago

I thought it was odd to see so many pop up in my small town. They're really "bling" and damage the small town peaceful look. It's really an eye-sore and wasted space. My car washing consists of occasional use of the gas station scrubber.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

I don't understand why we can't just let the market decide which businesses make sense based on their revenue vs. leasing the land. Presumably if car washes are so profitable it's because consumers want to use them, so why are we artificially restricting their expansion? It also provides a free subsidy to existing car washes who get to charge higher prices than they would in a competitive market. Restrictions to entering trade generally hurt consumers. FWIW, I've used a paid car wash <10x in my life so it doesn't matter that much to me.

avidiax 3y ago
Imagine, for a moment, an even freer market. Someone opens a car wash in a central area. They self-declare a tax value for the land and its improvements. We also allow that anyone can forcibly buy that land by paying that same self-declared tax value + X%. The sale can't be blocked. We've ended the monopoly of land ownership, and imposed a free market on land purchasing. Car washes that are a waste of the land they are placed on will get bought out and converted to other uses. If they are not, they will remain. This, by the way, is very close to a land value tax, and all we've done is force a fair appraisal of potential value for a parcel, rather than the current, possibly underutilized value.
- NegativeK 3y ago
  Forcing the sale of private property to anyone who can fork up the cash sounds absolutely ripe for abuse.
  - avidiax 3y ago
    Yes, real life is always more complicated. It would be necessary to block sales of a personal or vindictive nature, so the local rich guy can't force their enemies out of their homes. And have robust antitrust. And correct the perverse incentive towards poison pills, such as polluting the land to make it undesirable.
    - bombcar 3y ago

Haemm0r 3y ago

They watched Breaking Bad too much :-)

forgotpassword2 3y ago

Will it really be like the coffee market? I don't think so. Gen Z has the least intent to buy properties, buy cars, how will cars washes sustain in the future?

fragmede 3y ago
Is it intent or financial? If I couldn’t afford something, i can see myself, not bothering to try.

billforsternz 3y ago

I don't get the hostility to car washes. I've owned cars for 40 years and I'm pretty sure I've never hand washed one once. Life's too short. I like and need car washes.

sydbarrett74 3y ago

Henry George FTW.

TheBlight 3y ago

Cartels laundering money.

lencastre 3y ago

Subscription model car washing, saved you a click.

light_hue_1 3y ago

It's not just car washes. So many small towns are just gutted by bank branches. Beautiful historic downtowns that used to host shops and restaurants, half of which are banks now.

orojackson 3y ago

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned rinseless washes like Optimum No Rinse (ONR) as an option for washing your car. You dilute it with water in a 1:256 solution in a bucket, and then you use a slightly-dripping microfiber towel or a rinseless-wash-specific sponge to clean your car. The rinseless wash itself acts as its own drying aid, so you can wipe your car dry with a microfiber drying towel afterwards without having to rinse off the car (hence the term rinseless). I would say this is the cheapest, simplest, and (arguably) safest way to wash your car, especially if you buy the rinseless wash concentrate by the gallon. It's easy enough that it allows me to wash my car nearly every week. I only need about 3 gallons of water and 1.5 fluid ounces of ONR to fully wash one car.

higeorge13 3y ago

It’s funny that in Greece we have a similar situation with take away coffee places. There are just too many almost on every corner. And to make it relevant to the article, the last couple years people open coffee-hybrid businesses, like barber+cafe, car wash+cafe, and so on. :-)

globular-toast 3y ago

People still use automatic car washes in the US? They've almost completely disappeared in the UK. I've never used one in my life. We have hand car washes and self-service car washes instead (a jet wash). I thought it was well known the automatic ones ruined your paint work.

icar 3y ago

Well, I remember a story about a car wash that could explain why someone would want to own one...

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
chemistry teachers' salary is too low?

ufocia 3y ago

Breaking Bad made car washes a cultural icon. Perhaps people want to launder money or be as cool as Heisenberg/Walter White.

bombcar 3y ago

> Unlike stores, restaurants or other businesses, most self-service car washes don’t pay sales taxes to their host communities. Then why don't they? It seems a taxable event has occurred, so tax it? Maybe the current regulations count it as something else, so it has no sales tax.

0n0n0m0uz 3y ago

Interesting, I have had this conversation many times about Montrose, Colorado. There are more car washes there in terms of its size than any place I have ever been and there are more under construction.

diogenescynic 3y ago

The article doesn't mention it, but I read another article about car washes that argued they're used as a way to speculate on commercial real estate in cities because the car washes provide just enough revenue to pay for the purchase of the land and property taxes. Then when the land becomes valuable they can sell it to another developer.

bombcar 3y ago
The most famous of those is parking lots. I'm not sure car washes are the same, because a car wash is way more expensive than paving a lot.
malfist 3y ago
Just like storage units?
- diogenescynic 3y ago
  Absolutely. I can think of a few storage units that are in prime real estate locations that make no sense--like right across the street from Oracle Park in San Francisco. Has to be some of the most expensive real estate in the entire city/state and it's being used for storage units...
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    Could that land have toxic soil, and therefore not be zoned for anything else?
    - Solvency 3y ago
      When in doubted the answer is always "because something is utterly fucked in that zone" and done by humans.
      - renewiltord 3y ago
        In SF, the answer is always "because the neighbours complained".

polonbike 3y ago

Did the serie Breaking Bad inspire a trend, showing a seemingly innocent/efficient way to clean money ?

Plasmoid 3y ago
From what I've heard the current way to clean cash is to buy gift cards and then use them to buy items from Amazon/Steam. Sure, the store fronts take a cut but having a 1099 from Valve looks way more legitimate than reporting thousands of dollars of cash.
- notdang 3y ago
  So how do you clean them with this scheme? By registering a game on Steam or selling something on Amazon? Also made me think why in the country I live, in stores like 7Eleven you cannot pay with a credit card for gift cards, google pay cards, etc.
  - Plasmoid 3y ago
    From what I understand the scheme works like this. Create a very basic "game" that technically meets Valve's requirements. As long as it runs well enough then it won't be blocked. Have people buy Steam gift cards with cash, then buy the games you have published. Valve takes 30% and you get a nice check with a verified source of funds from a legitimate company.
diggan 3y ago
Unlikely, the meme of using car washing places for washing money has been around for longer than the tv show.
dilyevsky 3y ago
The show was written in eary 2000s - I seriously doubt many people pay cash anymore
- jjulius 3y ago

bluefirebrand 3y ago

In my city you're not allowed to wash your car in your driveway I guess it's too hard on the storm drains to have soap and dirt and stuff going down them Or maybe city council is just in some kind of racket with car wash owners or something But either way, that's why we have so many car washes here... And it sucks ass

nunez 3y ago
You'll never need to worry about this if you try using Optimum No Rinse waterless wash. It cleans and details your entire car with 2.5gal of water. I've been using thus for over two years now and will not wash our cars any other way.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
This is interesting, what you mention. In the northern foothills here bordering Phoenix, Arizona, to the north, there are an understandable number of automated carwashes. However, i've found no manual (pressure wash sort) carwashes, which are easy to find in California and Illinois, for two examples. I don't know why this is.
- anotheruser13 3y ago
  In Chicago, it's always good to rinse the salt off your car to prevent rust. I recall doing this several times during many winters there. Never had a problem with rust on any car I owned.
- ohmyiv 3y ago
  Could it be that single family homeownership is higher there? I can kind of speak for some of L.A.'s use of manual car washes. There's many who live in apartments or places that don't have places to wash at home. Manual car washes fill the void for people that want to clean their own car but don't have space.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    it might be. It might also be a water conservation thing, somehow, but I can't see how that would work unless they filter the water used in teh carwashes that are automatic and reuse them in some way not feasible with the power-wash-for-quarters sorts of stalls.

babas 3y ago

I've been thinking about this same phenomenon. I reside in Norway, where, interestingly, five different car washes opened in 2023 within a 2 km radius of my local neighborhood. Remarkably, four of these are clustered within a 300m stretch inside a commercial park. Our local area has a population of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 people. Each car wash is operated by a different entity, offering unique apps and subscription plans. It's hard to imagine this being profitable given the circumstances. But what do I know, I wash my own car.

eastbound 3y ago
Everyone wants to be a remote entrepreneur passive income digital nomad.
myself248 3y ago
...did you say 'apps'?
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  There is one by me that lets you pay wirelessly with an app. They have an unlimited wash subscription plan you can only get with that. I am not really sure how it works (bluetooth?) but I guess it would speed things up. I would try it to puzzle it out, but its one of those spinnybrush antenna destroyers and I'm not gonna risk it.
- compootr 3y ago
  I hate the trend that everything must be an app
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    Honestly I bought freezer food bags recently and even they had a bloody app. Each one is stamped with a QR code and you can use the app to record what's in each one. Absolutely bizarre. I continue to use a Sharpie.

nytesky 3y ago

I would have assumed its from the rise of gig workers using private cars. Uber/Lyft need to keep cars pretty clean to not be dinged stars, and even package and food delivery can create more mess which may require cleaning (but mostly taxi service I think). I skimmed the article and don’t see mention of that?

elwell 3y ago
But if I can avoid buying a car because Uber, then number of washes goes down or is at least balanced.
- williamdclt 3y ago
  In London at least, Uber is an alternative to public transport (and taxis obv), not to car ownership
  - cassianoleal 3y ago
    Both public transport and taxi/cab/uber are alternatives to car ownership.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Unless you are rich taxi/uber is not an alternative to car ownership. (rich call it a limo). Those are alternatives for when something else covers most of your needs but once in a while it is lacking. If you own a car you need a 'i'm drunk' option. If you take transit you need a 'i'm going where transit doesn't or is too slow' option.
      - cassianoleal 3y ago
        You're not wrong but my point stands. I'm not saying taking an uber everywhere is an alternative to having a car. It's part of the system. There's public transport (tube, DLR, overground, trams, busses), there's rental bikes, rental scooters, there's uber/taxi, there's walking. You use the "car ownership alternative" (or a combination of them) that works for each given situation.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Year after Year, I kept thinking this was a fad and would crash. But years go by, and now they are calling it a 'boom'. 14 billion dollar market. For Car Washes? Isn't this an indicator that economy is fine, people are fine, since they can spend this type of money on car washes? How can something this worthless be booming, if people are struggling.

diogenescynic 3y ago
My local car was has a $20/month subscription for unlimited washes. These aren't exactly luxury services--they're priced similar to a Netflix plan. If you have a car, it's worth it if you value our time at all.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lowkj 3y ago
  But if you value your time, why would you wash your car multiple times per month?
  - greedo 3y ago
    It takes roughly five minutes depending on how long the queue is, so when I'm out running errands I'll stop in. Keeps the road crud (and most importantly, salt) off the car so it lasts longer.
  - phillc73 3y ago
    That's perfect. I do not wash my car, because I value my time. I thought I was just lazy!
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      It is so simple to come up with excuses. It is raining. No need to go. We are in spring and here it means the dirty season, no need to go. Or it is negative temperature outside, it probably does not dry...

jnwatson 3y ago

In Houston and Dallas 30 years ago these were common. When I moved to the East coast 20 years ago I was surprised it wasn't a thing here. The first Flagship car wash arrived 10 years ago, and they are always busy. Still, how many can a town support?

socar 3y ago

Money Laundering, rings a bell ?

diogenescynic 3y ago
I thought that was what all the mattress stores were for.
- xenospn 3y ago
  Mattress stores and Psychics. Seriously, there’s thousands of both all across the United States - and I’ve never seen anyone set foot in either.
  - popcalc 3y ago
    Psychics are lucrative. They prey on people in the most desperate times of their life and often make off with their life savings. That's why there's one right next to the Louboutin store in Beverly Hills.
AmVess 3y ago
Hard to do since most of these are credit card only now. They are popping up because it is good, mostly passive income if you are in the right area.
- nix0n 3y ago
  "Credit card only" is a sure sign of money laundering: it's a way to game the cash vs credit ratio. (Edit: maybe "sure sign" is a little bit hasty, but I think the other possible reasons for a "credit card only" sign are actually worse morally than money laundering)
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    "Credit card only" meant everything have paper trail. Maybe some tax avoidance scheme, not money laundering.

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago

Not joking, Ivy League graduates who might have went into finance, have started raising capital and funding small cash returning businesses. It is now seen as a legitimate career path, sometimes called a "search fund". An HBS graduate might aspire to buy and run a blue collar business as a way to understand the market. There are private equity funds that might aquire 50 of these businesses at 2-5M each, roll them into an index, and sell the index. Same with doctors/dentist practices. The financing of these businesses is so opaque.

philip1209 3y ago
Yeah, "Entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA)", is something I've seen a lot of MBAs study and prioritize. Is it really entrepreneurship though? Seems like "Buy, squeeze, rinse, and repeat" - which is killing businesses rather than creating them.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  Its not that much different from raising 10M (with nothing but an idea) to build some generic type of software that already has a market. A big secret, raising huge amounts of capital to be an "Entrepreneur", isnt really Entrepreneurship, its being placed into a management position of executing on an already existing (usually proven) idea. VCs certainly see it this way, and so do the pedigreed people they fund. The only people thinking its different, are the ones on the outside looking in.

jameskilton 3y ago

In my area, the home of Tommy Car Wash[1], they are explicitly testing out how many car washes in a city are sustainable given a certain population size, so yeah we (Holland, MI) are surrounded by them. [1] https://tommycarwash.com/ https://tommycarwash.com/

Solvency 3y ago

Why so many car washes? Why are there so many cars? Because our country is ultimately designed and developed by urban sprawl madmen with a highway fetish and zero vision for a better way for humans to live and operate. I love how we hyper fixate on stupid questions about car washes while pretending like car dependency isn't the problem.

elwell 3y ago
Do you think it's that orchestrated? I think it's more: evolution / chaos / emergent behavior.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Some of each. There are people opposing efforts to make things better. However there also is a lot that ever step makes things better for someone in particular who thus cares more than the more generic society that got worse.
- MBCook 3y ago
  The moves to the suburbs was orchestrated. The moves to newer suburbs from the existing ones was orchestrated. The encouragement of driving everywhere was orchestrated. Not to cause us to need more car washes. But it was by design.

Bjorkbat 3y ago

Huh, this whole time I thought they were just a way to launder money from selling meth

SkyPuncher 3y ago

I have actually briefly considered opening a car wash. They seem like just about one of the easiest businesses to run. Minimal employees, low variable costs, likely a reasonable long term investment in the actual rental estate. In many ways, this the same as gas stations, convenience stores, and CVS/rite-aid/walgreens. People don’t want to go out if their way.

mrweasel 3y ago
That might actually be part of it. If you go to YouTube, things like laundromats, vending machines and CAR WASHES are pretty big with the passive income "movement". We're seeing more car washes opening up around here, but I think that is just as much about having the area under services for ages. Now I don't have to wait in line for 45 minutes, or risk a fine for cleaning my car in the drive way (which I don't think you should be doing anyway).
fragmede 3y ago
more importantly, after the switch to EVs, you're still gonna need car washes. Gas stations, not so much.
- bombcar 3y ago
  My guess is the gas stations will have car washes attached to them (as some already do). I suspect some of this all is them being "sold" and in a few years a bunch will be gone, unable to make the payments on the loans taken.

samsk 3y ago

Ouch, just remembered I've missed my regular yearly car wash. Don't tell I should do such a unnecessary and time consuming thing more often.

elwell 3y ago

Because every year we're more so too lazy/busy for physical work. Not judging that, just observing.

avidphantasm 3y ago

[flagged]

neonate 3y ago

https://archive.ph/Umqn3 https://archive.ph/Umqn3

bee_rider 3y ago

1) Who is spending $20 a month on car washes? 2) If the problem is that subscription users aren’t paying local sales taxes, why not charge property taxes? (or, Land Value Tax!)

nickthegreek 3y ago
$20 is 2 car washes. Around here moo moo car wash chain is all over and you cat get unlimited washes for like $30/month. Anywhere there is a moo-moo’s there is also a line of cars. Some people get obsessed with keeping their cars squeaky clean here.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  $30/month to wait in a line. Fun times we live in.
  - lotsoweiners 3y ago
    Why assume there is a line? I spent like $1500 just for the tickets twice last year to take my family of 4 to Disneyland which is mostly standing in line.
    - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
      Surely Disneyland is more fun than a car wash
      - bombcar 3y ago
        If you take the kids to the car wash when they're small enough, you can tell them it's Disneyland.
sheepybloke 3y ago
You end up spending that much if you live in a winter climate. Salt is really bad for cars, so you end up washing a time or two a month generally.

logifail 3y ago

> There are four full-service car washes in town, with a fifth on the way; three are bunched up on a mile-and-a-half stretch of Route 14. Social media complaints about car wash overkill spurred town leaders to take action. Four (or even five) doesn't sound that much? What's the actual problem here? How is a local politican supposed to determine what is the correct density of any particular type of service within her juristidiction? Assuming all other laws and ordinances are being complied with, and that there is no actual "nuisance", why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? Last night I stayed at a hotel very close to London Heathrow Airport. There, on the Bath Road, there are (literally) dozens of hotels, one right next to another. This is a feature not a bug! Apparently, there is lots of demand for hotels at that location, which isn't exactly a surprise. If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right?

hobobaggins 3y ago
Also helps keep prices in line. Perhaps a local car wash owner wants to maintain their monopoly (that was actually alluded to, but not greatly discussed, in the article!)
beejiu 3y ago
Yep, businesses naturally cluster like this. It's called Hotelling's Law: https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/ https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/
- boringg 3y ago
  You should see how Hanoi businesses used to cluster
- bandyaboot 3y ago
  > Especially true in the American two-party system, political parties want to maximize vote allocated to their candidate. Political parties will adjust their platform to comply with the median voters’ demand. The Comparative Midpoints Model represents this idea best: Both political parties will get as close to the competing party’s platform while preserving its own identity. On the contrary, the ever increasing dysfunction in US politics is largely because the players have hacked their way past the constraints of this model.

tonetheman 3y ago

[dead]

brevitea 3y ago

Money Laundering.

flyinghamster 3y ago
Or real-estate shenanigans, for that matter. It makes me think of Mattress Firm having locations less than a mile from one another.
cush 3y ago
Walter White is dead. More likely that most people with cars no longer own driveways and car washes have been completely automated, so they’ve become a good, economical choice over the years. It’s a lucrative business now. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/car-washes/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/car-washes/

sroussey 3y ago

There is a federal write off for car washes, so no real surprise. https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cost-segregation-for-car-washes/ https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cos...

hobobaggins 3y ago
Depreciation is available for any company that purchases equipment; the "unique" thing as described in that article is simply that most of the value for car washes is in the equipment, so depreciation strategies are very important, but any business can and should write off equipment, or any other expense against net profits.
- dr-detroit 3y ago
  [dead]
- sroussey 3y ago
  Oh, sorry I thought the article had more detail. There is an accelerated depreciate for car washes that runs out in 2026 I think.
  - sroussey 3y ago
    Here is a better article: https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cost-segregation-for-car-washes/ https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cos... > The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 made a significant change in this area, currently allowing businesses to write off 80% of the cost of qualifying property in the year it's placed in service Why depreciate over 39 years when you can do 80% in one year.
    - gunapologist99 3y ago
      Same article, right? And there's nothing in there to do with car washes specifically, though? Just general MACRS etc?

Antip0dean 3y ago

This is a big thing in the UK, too. The official narrative here is modern slavery with undocumented migrants. It's the same with sex work, with which is harder to separate between conservative propaganda and reality. I expect the main difference between the US and UK versions are that the latter are typically set up in disused urban plots with pop-up tents and temporary chain-link fences rather than having any investment. Either way, if you're getting 3-5 people washing your car for a tenner, the people you're handing you money to are probably receiving minimal pennies on the dollar.

gotoeleven 3y ago
Sorry it's conservative propaganda that illegal immigrants will work for very low wages at crappy jobs?
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  > It's the same with sex work, with which is harder to separate between conservative propaganda and reality. No?
  - tom_ 3y ago
    I guess they edited their post, because your quote no longer applies?
    - lolinder 3y ago
      The quote is from the GP.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  I volunteer at a refugee charity. In my experience people given the right to stay will take whatever work they can get, which is often crappy work at low wages due to lack of transferable skills and/or English (e.g. security guard).
notso411 3y ago

krupan 3y ago

tl;dr government interference

bell-cot 3y ago

The real cause - a "turn crank, make money" financial model: > But the industry’s biggest recent innovation involves its business model, which has increasingly focused on membership and recurring revenue. ... > Now, washes can take just 90 seconds, labor costs have been automated down, and recurring revenue from memberships has eliminated weather risks. Plus, the tax reforms enacted in 2017 by former president Donald Trump allowed car wash owners to claim 100% depreciation on new equipment — a generous subsidy to further investment. While that incentive was written to shrink over time, the tax proposal currently in Congress would restore the 100% depreciation allowance. ... > In analyzing usage patterns, the industry soon found that the convenience of wash memberships translated to higher profits. A typical non-member may come in three or four times a year, while a typical member gets that many washes each month. But at $20 a month, that’s a huge jump in annual spending — more than enough to cover the costs of accommodating heavy users who may scrub their SUVs dozens of times a month. SO - at least where I live, the number of monthly payment/unlimited washes car washes has exploded in recent years. Even so, there's often a line (of very new, very expensive) vehicles waiting at them.

lettergram 3y ago

The cynical me says - easy way to launder money (same with nutrition stores). You don’t have to move much material and you can get large volumes of “sales”

cebert 3y ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493919

bell-cot 3y ago
True. But that's the same article, with 0-ish comments - so no value here.

smeej 3y ago

Automated ones are fine, but what I've really missed since I moved to New England have been the ones where a team vacuums the inside, hoses off your mats, wipes your windows and dashboard inside, etc. Growing up in the West and Midwest, these things were absolutely normal for the first 30 years of my life. Some of them would even change the oil too. But I haven't found anywhere within 50 miles of me that will do it here. I'm not talking "detailing." This was $35 including the oil.

liquidpele 3y ago
One near us does this. It’s like $100 now though.
chrisco255 3y ago
I've lived in TX and FL and these types of services are everywhere. Even many of the automated carwashes where you vacuum your own car after the wash will usually charge an extra fee if you want the inside cleaned by staff.
subpixel 3y ago
These are still normal where undocumented workers are willing to hustle for low pay and tips. In Queens I got a hand wash and interior detail for less than $50. Where I live now $225.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Labor costs arr too high for this to exist anymore.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  That may depend on region. These still exist in the suburbs outside Birmingham, AL. Last I saw the prices varied from $15-30 for a wash, wax, detail, and hand dry. They don't offer an oil change though, I've never seen a wash+detail+oil change in the area. At scale I'd assume they could do it for closer to $50, if $35 was a 2005 price that's on par with inflation and beating inflation for some industries like food.

nobodywillobsrv 3y ago

M O N E Y L A U N D E R I N G