Perhaps inspired by a certain TV series championing science and working class teachers?
Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
301–310 of 615 posts
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#302I 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…
>this is just another instance of how low property taxes and the absence of land value taxes massively benefits low-value businesses
Thank god we haven't optimized that fully. This is how small businesses like local cafes, delis, bookstores, and "mom and pop" stores are able to survive in cities.
I wouldn't want to live in any capitalist shit-hole where land value taxes force high-value businesses.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kind of funny listening to the silly things free market maximalists tend to say.... "Local people electing a local government choosing what gets built locally is communism"
You should live in a country without a culture and legal framework for competitive markets, or try to talk to someone first hand who has such experience. I suspect you're a good person who just misunderstands how markets and individual rights interconnect. If the local government can simply declare "there are enough X, no more are allowed" then the rich, powerful and well-connected elite can solidify their privileged…
Right, I get it, monopolies are bad and this is something I completely agree with. At the same time those well connected elite will commonly band together to create monopolies via predatory pricing, so it turns out that no matter what way you do it you have to have regulatory markets that seek to benefit the consumer.
The elite have all the tools they need already, they always have had that. Representative government is the modern change that keeps them from dominating everything.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#304In 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
I think generally it should not be allowed. A big component of soap is phosphates, which promote algae growth so you really don't want it in your rivers. Some cities have combined or separated sewer systems. Even if combined, it may be designed to overflow during heavy rain, so it's not a guarantee that car wash water with dirt, soap and oil will not go into into a stream somewhere although in that case you're also s…
> Some cities have combined or separated sewer systems.
I wonder how many cities still have a combined system. At least where I live, I could totally see the amount of water coming from the sky regularly beating the amount coming from household drains. Along those lines, our city is spending money replacing private sewer laterals (normally a 10-20K job the homeowner is responsible for) just to cut down on the water intrusion the old laterals (especially party lines) let into the sewer. It's cheaper to pay for the new laterals than it is to build a larger treatment plant.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#305I 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…
can you please elaborate on this? i don’t understand exactly. “The real business of car washes is real estate, it's profitable enough to get 3-4x leverage with a low interest loan”
The OP asserts (I agree) that the real profit from running a car wash is not the daily turnover of car washing, but the capital appreciation of the land the car wash sits on. The part about leverage assumes you are able to get a loan/mortgage to purchase the land the car wash sits on. In effect you are using the car wash as a reason to justify a mortgage you wouldn't otherwise be able to get for real estate speculation alone.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my city you're not allowed to wash your car in your driveway How does this even get enforced? Are the police driving by everyone’s house regularly, looking for those dastardly hoses? Or do they rely on nosey neighbors ratting on each other? I can’t imagine this is the most important crime for the local law enforcement to be investigating.
Seriously. I could just hose down my car while I’m hosing off the driveway and no one would be the wiser
IMO someone would have to be pretty anal retentive to get bent out of shape over just hosing down your car with a hose. That's not really any different than what happens when it rains hard. My local jurisdiction only cares about the car wash soap you use. Even then, they just ask that we use phosphate-free soap, not that we don't wash the car in the driveway at all.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#307> 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…
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.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#308> 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…
> 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.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Markets have failure modes, but not nearly as many failure modes as bumbling politicians thinking they can decide for the rest of society how many car washes belong in their town. Oh no, who will ever do anything about the abandoned husks and unemployed people left behind when we let people build too many car washes!? Let’s just make it borderline fucking illegal to build anything at all and let every busybody in the…
The irony is that car washes are the result of regulation in the first place because if you eliminated parking requirements, ridiculously low insurance minimums etc there'd be a lot fewer cars that needed washing. It's kind of odd to frame intervention in anything car related as an intrusion on the free market when it's one of the most artificially and politically constructed sectors to begin with.
> ridiculously low insurance minimums
This looks like a claim that car owners should be required to have even more insurance, which seems inconsistent with your claim that widespread car ownership is the product of onerous regulation.
All in all I think this is a pretty glib take that I’ve seen enough times that I’m bored with it. Suffice to say that most of the regulations you’re complaining about mostly postdate the widescale adoption of cars. Nobody was instituting parking minimums or insurance mandates ahead of time in order to encourage car ownership; instead, as soon as car companies figured out how to make cars cheaply enough that even their own factory workers could afford them, governments made regulations in response to the overwhelming number of cars that everyone ended up buying.
But that’s a fundamentally different mindset. Back then, living in a democracy where everybody was buying cars meant that the government’s job was to notice that people wanted to drive cars and work to accommodate that. These days, people think the government’s job is to decide for us what we should want and then shape the regulatory environment in such a way as to shape our behavior, because they know better than we do.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's saying it rains and the car gets clean. I only needed to rinse my car off once a year, max, and did that with a garden hose. It was fine otherwise. Car washes are a waste.
I live in the PNW where it rains pretty steadily most of the year and my car gets absolutely gross if I don't wash it once every couple months. Not dusty, I mean filthy dirty. Rain does not make the car clean, quite the opposite. All that water on the road getting kicked up brings muck with it.
I live in an area of the PNW where it snows and rains a lot during the winter, and rains more during the summer. Mud loves to stick to everything, and the Magnesium Chloride they use to de-ice roads loves to oxidize the frame of vehicles.
I have everything at home to clean our vehicles, but I can’t just run the hose during the winter when it’s most important because of the MgCl; so I’ll take our rigs to the wash if we are in town (nearest car wash is 60 minutes away) to clean the undercarriage and minimize rusting.