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> 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 complaint

> 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.
megablast 3y ago
Four, when there used to be none 10 years ago.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Is this in the article? I just read through it twice trying to find a reference to how many were there 10 years ago, but couldn't find anything. Even if it were true, I'm not sure that that shows there are too many car washes, just that consumer behavior surrounding car washes has changed dramatically in recent years.
atrus 3y ago
> If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right? I find it interesting that we have sayings like this, and sayings like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." > why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? Because the market doesn't price in externalities. Sure the market will figure out which car washes live. But what about the ones that don't and the people who subsequently lose their jobs. It's a fair question to ask if you're building too many of a certain service, especially when the ones that fail leave behind abandoned husks and unemployed people. Ya know, the people that the local politician is supposed to help. Local leaders should be at least thinking about these questions.
- grecy 3y ago
  > Sure the market will figure out which car washes live. But what about the ones that don't and the people who subsequently lose their jobs There's a lot going on in your statement to dig through. The article specifically says these car washes barely add jobs.. but let's ignore that. When a business opens and starts to hire people, there is no guarantee it will exist long term. When a person applies for a job, they need to do some due diligence researching the business to see if it sounds like something that will be around as long as they want to have a job. Are you proposing we shouldn't allow "risky" business to start and hire people because there is no certainty they will be around in 1-5 years? Of course that doesn't make any sense. If a business fails, people will lose their jobs, but that is not a reason to prevent business from starting. In fact, if we did prevent them, those jobs would have never existed!
  - RussianCow 3y ago
    > When a person applies for a job, they need to do some due diligence researching the business to see if it sounds like something that will be around as long as they want to have a job. This is a nitpick as I agree with the rest of your comment, but most people are absolutely not qualified to make that assessment. (In fact, it's debatable whether anyone can make that claim with any amount of certainty. Even the most successful investors are often wrong.)
mr_toad 3y ago
The social media complaints are probably Astro turfing by the existing car washes that don’t want any more competition.
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  The article does mention that, but only in passing! I'm surprised they didn't dig more into it, since the most vocal opponents to more competition would probably be existing businesses!
- lolinder 3y ago
  Or, more likely, there are legitimate concerns had by part of the town even though another part of the town uses and appreciates them. Both groups can exist at once without astroturfing! A new car wash recently popped up on the main road near my house, and it has definitely had a substantial negative impact on the traffic patterns surrounding it. Basically every time I go that way I have to maneuver around people clogging up the road waiting to turn into it. It's not enough to cause me any real pain, but it's definitely enough to make me feel less than kindly towards the proliferation.
jrm4 3y ago
It's just so absurdly naive to think that the market acts this cleanly and quickly, it's probably the worst "brain worm" that economics has given us. Maybe it helps to consider the idea that the government (which already has considerable influence, positive and negative to markets) is part of how preferences are expressed.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  No one said anything about quickly and cleanly until you introduced those words. If your argument is that the government tends to act more quickly than the market, I would be interested to see something backing that up. For something like a car wash that doesn't really affect the people around it much, why would we need to regulate that? Oh no, there are more car washes than some people on Nextdoor think are necessary? Who cares? If there is sufficient demand for car washes that all of them stay in business, then they'll stay, because the local area wants that many car washes. If they aren't binging in money, they'll close. Or just pay out to their employee and landlord indefinitely.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    This is why the US has a few trillion in infrastructure debt. "Oh no, the city had to put in a few million in pipes to supply additional water to an area that had a huge demand spike taking a long term bond on the issue... and now they are all out of business and earning no taxes to pay for the expense. Too bad we didn't actually plan for reasonable growth and resource usage. Hopefully someone can bail us out"
  - jrm4 3y ago
    Tends to? Absolutely not, but nor is it required to? Though I'd definitely give "the government" some credit for net neutrality here; I heard the term in govt spaces well before it was much of an issue. As for "doesn't affect the people around it." Oh, sigh. So I'm pretty familiar with local governments and the work they do, and one thing is abundantly clear; very very many people have no clue "what affects them," until the thing they're used to changes. A TON -- probably the overwhelming majority -- of local government work is "invisible stuff that the people never notice precisely because that local government is doing its job correctly."
pkulak 3y ago
> why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? If we taxed land, then sure, we'd get efficient use of land. But we (mostly) don't, so here we are, surrounded by car washes and parking lots.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  >But we (mostly) don't Just because we don't have Georgism doesn't mean we don't already tax land a ton. Annual property tax revenue for the entire US is ~$600 billion. By comparison, federal income tax revenue is about $2.6 trillion annually.
  - pkulak 3y ago
    Property tax is mostly the structure though.
  - alexb_ 3y ago
    Property tax is not land tax.
TylerE 3y ago
If it’s anything like the 3 that have opened in my town of 80k in literally the last year it’s because they’re huuuuuuge. The wash itself is 100+ft long, and tons of parking, vacuums, etc. Just one of those things takes up the space of 3 or 4 normal gas stations. The crazy thing is that after a small wave of initial enthusiasm, they hardly ever even have customers.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  If they don't have customers wouldn't we expect them to shut down at some point?
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Then we get to look at ugly shell of it for years. Commercial real estate is not exactly booming. Most of those places are probably borderline superfund sites with all the chemicals that leach into the soil, anyway.
- PennRobotics 3y ago
  A bunch of the same business also takes away space from the sorts of businesses that your region probably lacks which would make the town more self-sufficient, interesting, and/or economically productive: a butcher, a jeweler, an audiologist, an independent insurer, a pub, a gardening store, a glassmaker, a theater, a brewer, a computer repair shop, and so on. My hometown of 40,000 has five; one which replaced the only movie theater in the county (a one-hour radius) that closed at the end of 2020. The local government remarked the car wash will provide jobs. Three employees are needed, according to the "local" news. (Actually, the local newspapers were replaced years ago by a nationwide chain of "independent, regional" news sourcers.) I'm glad I got away from that place. The most fun you could have on a Friday night was meeting friends at Walmart and then driving to an empty parking lot.
moomin 3y ago
I’d ask you what you think the purpose of a local politician is, if not to reflect the local people’s wishes in the development of their area.
- I-M-S 3y ago
  Ideally to optimize for long-term prosperity of the area while taking the needs of the greater community into account.
Spooky23 3y ago
Clearly the “market”, defined as a real estate syndicator with an excel sheet and cap table knows way more than the actual people who live in an area. It’s not like Adam Smith’s invisible finger didn’t touch the cupcake bakery mania, froyo, etc.
Terretta 3y ago
> dozens of hotels… feature not bug One hotel (hub) with differentiated service levels could be more efficient, effective, and ecologically minded. Think Vegas casino property without the casino.
- ViktorRay 3y ago
  This doesn't make sense. You are arguing that a monopoly (1 hotel in an area) would be more efficient than a dozen in an area who compete strongly? For customers the area that has many hotels that compete with each other will be better than the area that just has one. The area with one hotel would have a single hotel that would have no incentive to be efficient or effective.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    I do realize this is getting into "is Gene Roddenberry's post-scarcity society even possible starting from capitalism?" When deciding whether competition is the best governance should take into account system scope or level for that competition. Are you competing at the level of hotel rooms and restaurants within a hotel, at the level of hotels, at the neighborhoods clusters of hotels are in, at sectors of ecosystems like hotels versus transportation versus other people uses of land and resources.
    - logifail 3y ago
      > the best governance should take into account system scope or level for that competition. Are you competing at the level of hotel rooms and restaurants within a hotel, at the level of hotels, at the neighborhoods clusters of hotels are in, at sectors of ecosystems like hotels versus transportation versus other people uses of land and resources I think there's competition at all of those levels, and that's a good thing.
- nawgz 3y ago
  Isn't this just true about everything? Having a bunch of shipping companies makes way less sense than having a single globally-integrated logistics solution that everyone uses that could therefore know about and plan around far larger scales. What I'm trying to say is I don't understand your point.
dclowd9901 3y ago
Four or 5 car washes for a city of 17000 people? That’s 1 per 3000 or so people, of which I’m sure only _some_ actually own cars to wash (vs, say, children). Assuming one uses a car wash for 10 minutes maybe once a month, the 5 car wash locations have capacity for something like 144,000 washes a month. Basically 10x the need for a town of that size.
- criddell 3y ago
  There’s another car wash being built in my neighborhood right now. There are now 5 within a 10-15 minute drive from my house. A few years ago, mattress stores were popping up all around my neighborhood. Today most of them are gone. These things seem to come in waves and I’ve never understood what drives it.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It's often a franchisee wave coming through. One reason to limit the number is to prevent them all dying out - I saw a situation near my house years ago where there was a successful laundromat, another opened nearby and both were doing OK but not amazing, and then a third opened up - and all three ended up dying. There was no laundromat for awhile and finally a new fourth one opened up nearby.
scruple 3y ago
I'm in south Orange county, California, and... Yeah. Maybe this is car wash mecca? I can think of 6 within a 2 mile radius of my home without even trying. 3 of them are full-service places, too, and they've been there for longer than I've been here (2016, so not that long) and they're always serving cars.
bux93 3y ago
Four or five doesn't sound like much, but the article buries the lede by hiding this fact in a caption: "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" and in the article itself "the sector has been expanding at roughly 5% annually, with some forecasts predicting the market to double by 2030. More car washes were built in the last decade than all the preceding years combined." Seems a bit much? The concerns over land use and pollution suggest that the car washes are not paying for negative externalities, removing a natural cap on their proliferation. Smells like market failure. Why wait for the businesses to fail?
dboreham 3y ago
The lack of shuttles from those hotels to the terminal seems like a bug though.
- logifail 3y ago
  > The lack of shuttles from those hotels to the terminal https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/documents/transport/Heathrow-area-bus-map.pdf https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc... Admittedly, the local bus services around the airport which used to be free of charge (prior to 2021) are now chargable, but at less than £2 per trip the services are hardly expensive and are fairly fast and very frequent ... unlike the Hotel Hoppa services which seem primarily designed to rip off unsuspecting visitors.

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.

megablast 3y ago

Four, when there used to be none 10 years ago.

lolinder 3y ago
Is this in the article? I just read through it twice trying to find a reference to how many were there 10 years ago, but couldn't find anything. Even if it were true, I'm not sure that that shows there are too many car washes, just that consumer behavior surrounding car washes has changed dramatically in recent years.

atrus 3y ago

> If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right? I find it interesting that we have sayings like this, and sayings like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." > why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? Because the market doesn't price in externalities. Sure the market will figure out which car washes live. But what about the ones that don't and the people who subsequently lose their jobs. It's a fair question to ask if you're building too many of a certain service, especially when the ones that fail leave behind abandoned husks and unemployed people. Ya know, the people that the local politician is supposed to help. Local leaders should be at least thinking about these questions.

grecy 3y ago
> Sure the market will figure out which car washes live. But what about the ones that don't and the people who subsequently lose their jobs There's a lot going on in your statement to dig through. The article specifically says these car washes barely add jobs.. but let's ignore that. When a business opens and starts to hire people, there is no guarantee it will exist long term. When a person applies for a job, they need to do some due diligence researching the business to see if it sounds like something that will be around as long as they want to have a job. Are you proposing we shouldn't allow "risky" business to start and hire people because there is no certainty they will be around in 1-5 years? Of course that doesn't make any sense. If a business fails, people will lose their jobs, but that is not a reason to prevent business from starting. In fact, if we did prevent them, those jobs would have never existed!
- RussianCow 3y ago
  > When a person applies for a job, they need to do some due diligence researching the business to see if it sounds like something that will be around as long as they want to have a job. This is a nitpick as I agree with the rest of your comment, but most people are absolutely not qualified to make that assessment. (In fact, it's debatable whether anyone can make that claim with any amount of certainty. Even the most successful investors are often wrong.)

mr_toad 3y ago

The social media complaints are probably Astro turfing by the existing car washes that don’t want any more competition.

gunapologist99 3y ago
The article does mention that, but only in passing! I'm surprised they didn't dig more into it, since the most vocal opponents to more competition would probably be existing businesses!
lolinder 3y ago
Or, more likely, there are legitimate concerns had by part of the town even though another part of the town uses and appreciates them. Both groups can exist at once without astroturfing! A new car wash recently popped up on the main road near my house, and it has definitely had a substantial negative impact on the traffic patterns surrounding it. Basically every time I go that way I have to maneuver around people clogging up the road waiting to turn into it. It's not enough to cause me any real pain, but it's definitely enough to make me feel less than kindly towards the proliferation.

jrm4 3y ago

It's just so absurdly naive to think that the market acts this cleanly and quickly, it's probably the worst "brain worm" that economics has given us. Maybe it helps to consider the idea that the government (which already has considerable influence, positive and negative to markets) is part of how preferences are expressed.

margalabargala 3y ago
No one said anything about quickly and cleanly until you introduced those words. If your argument is that the government tends to act more quickly than the market, I would be interested to see something backing that up. For something like a car wash that doesn't really affect the people around it much, why would we need to regulate that? Oh no, there are more car washes than some people on Nextdoor think are necessary? Who cares? If there is sufficient demand for car washes that all of them stay in business, then they'll stay, because the local area wants that many car washes. If they aren't binging in money, they'll close. Or just pay out to their employee and landlord indefinitely.
- pixl97 3y ago
  This is why the US has a few trillion in infrastructure debt. "Oh no, the city had to put in a few million in pipes to supply additional water to an area that had a huge demand spike taking a long term bond on the issue... and now they are all out of business and earning no taxes to pay for the expense. Too bad we didn't actually plan for reasonable growth and resource usage. Hopefully someone can bail us out"
- jrm4 3y ago
  Tends to? Absolutely not, but nor is it required to? Though I'd definitely give "the government" some credit for net neutrality here; I heard the term in govt spaces well before it was much of an issue. As for "doesn't affect the people around it." Oh, sigh. So I'm pretty familiar with local governments and the work they do, and one thing is abundantly clear; very very many people have no clue "what affects them," until the thing they're used to changes. A TON -- probably the overwhelming majority -- of local government work is "invisible stuff that the people never notice precisely because that local government is doing its job correctly."

pkulak 3y ago

> why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? If we taxed land, then sure, we'd get efficient use of land. But we (mostly) don't, so here we are, surrounded by car washes and parking lots.

HideousKojima 3y ago
>But we (mostly) don't Just because we don't have Georgism doesn't mean we don't already tax land a ton. Annual property tax revenue for the entire US is ~$600 billion. By comparison, federal income tax revenue is about $2.6 trillion annually.
- pkulak 3y ago
  Property tax is mostly the structure though.
- alexb_ 3y ago
  Property tax is not land tax.

TylerE 3y ago

If it’s anything like the 3 that have opened in my town of 80k in literally the last year it’s because they’re huuuuuuge. The wash itself is 100+ft long, and tons of parking, vacuums, etc. Just one of those things takes up the space of 3 or 4 normal gas stations. The crazy thing is that after a small wave of initial enthusiasm, they hardly ever even have customers.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
If they don't have customers wouldn't we expect them to shut down at some point?
- TylerE 3y ago
  Then we get to look at ugly shell of it for years. Commercial real estate is not exactly booming. Most of those places are probably borderline superfund sites with all the chemicals that leach into the soil, anyway.
PennRobotics 3y ago
A bunch of the same business also takes away space from the sorts of businesses that your region probably lacks which would make the town more self-sufficient, interesting, and/or economically productive: a butcher, a jeweler, an audiologist, an independent insurer, a pub, a gardening store, a glassmaker, a theater, a brewer, a computer repair shop, and so on. My hometown of 40,000 has five; one which replaced the only movie theater in the county (a one-hour radius) that closed at the end of 2020. The local government remarked the car wash will provide jobs. Three employees are needed, according to the "local" news. (Actually, the local newspapers were replaced years ago by a nationwide chain of "independent, regional" news sourcers.) I'm glad I got away from that place. The most fun you could have on a Friday night was meeting friends at Walmart and then driving to an empty parking lot.

moomin 3y ago

I’d ask you what you think the purpose of a local politician is, if not to reflect the local people’s wishes in the development of their area.

I-M-S 3y ago
Ideally to optimize for long-term prosperity of the area while taking the needs of the greater community into account.

Spooky23 3y ago

Clearly the “market”, defined as a real estate syndicator with an excel sheet and cap table knows way more than the actual people who live in an area. It’s not like Adam Smith’s invisible finger didn’t touch the cupcake bakery mania, froyo, etc.

Terretta 3y ago

> dozens of hotels… feature not bug One hotel (hub) with differentiated service levels could be more efficient, effective, and ecologically minded. Think Vegas casino property without the casino.

ViktorRay 3y ago
This doesn't make sense. You are arguing that a monopoly (1 hotel in an area) would be more efficient than a dozen in an area who compete strongly? For customers the area that has many hotels that compete with each other will be better than the area that just has one. The area with one hotel would have a single hotel that would have no incentive to be efficient or effective.
- Terretta 3y ago
  I do realize this is getting into "is Gene Roddenberry's post-scarcity society even possible starting from capitalism?" When deciding whether competition is the best governance should take into account system scope or level for that competition. Are you competing at the level of hotel rooms and restaurants within a hotel, at the level of hotels, at the neighborhoods clusters of hotels are in, at sectors of ecosystems like hotels versus transportation versus other people uses of land and resources.
  - logifail 3y ago
    > the best governance should take into account system scope or level for that competition. Are you competing at the level of hotel rooms and restaurants within a hotel, at the level of hotels, at the neighborhoods clusters of hotels are in, at sectors of ecosystems like hotels versus transportation versus other people uses of land and resources I think there's competition at all of those levels, and that's a good thing.
nawgz 3y ago
Isn't this just true about everything? Having a bunch of shipping companies makes way less sense than having a single globally-integrated logistics solution that everyone uses that could therefore know about and plan around far larger scales. What I'm trying to say is I don't understand your point.

dclowd9901 3y ago

Four or 5 car washes for a city of 17000 people? That’s 1 per 3000 or so people, of which I’m sure only _some_ actually own cars to wash (vs, say, children). Assuming one uses a car wash for 10 minutes maybe once a month, the 5 car wash locations have capacity for something like 144,000 washes a month. Basically 10x the need for a town of that size.

criddell 3y ago
There’s another car wash being built in my neighborhood right now. There are now 5 within a 10-15 minute drive from my house. A few years ago, mattress stores were popping up all around my neighborhood. Today most of them are gone. These things seem to come in waves and I’ve never understood what drives it.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It's often a franchisee wave coming through. One reason to limit the number is to prevent them all dying out - I saw a situation near my house years ago where there was a successful laundromat, another opened nearby and both were doing OK but not amazing, and then a third opened up - and all three ended up dying. There was no laundromat for awhile and finally a new fourth one opened up nearby.

scruple 3y ago

I'm in south Orange county, California, and... Yeah. Maybe this is car wash mecca? I can think of 6 within a 2 mile radius of my home without even trying. 3 of them are full-service places, too, and they've been there for longer than I've been here (2016, so not that long) and they're always serving cars.

bux93 3y ago

Four or five doesn't sound like much, but the article buries the lede by hiding this fact in a caption: "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" and in the article itself "the sector has been expanding at roughly 5% annually, with some forecasts predicting the market to double by 2030. More car washes were built in the last decade than all the preceding years combined." Seems a bit much? The concerns over land use and pollution suggest that the car washes are not paying for negative externalities, removing a natural cap on their proliferation. Smells like market failure. Why wait for the businesses to fail?

dboreham 3y ago

The lack of shuttles from those hotels to the terminal seems like a bug though.

logifail 3y ago
> The lack of shuttles from those hotels to the terminal https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/documents/transport/Heathrow-area-bus-map.pdf https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc... Admittedly, the local bus services around the airport which used to be free of charge (prior to 2021) are now chargable, but at less than £2 per trip the services are hardly expensive and are fairly fast and very frequent ... unlike the Hotel Hoppa services which seem primarily designed to rip off unsuspecting visitors.