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.
Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
411–420 of 615 posts
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#412This 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 invest…
I've often wondered how legit those 'hand car washes' are. Legit or not, I'm sure it is hard work for crappy money.
I can confirm they wash your car if you pay them to. Is that legit enough?
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who defines more productive business? Maybe car wash is a good business for people to work for in some period of live. USSR tries to optimize business from top but selecting what would be produced and how much. Didn’t work well for community or customers.
And late stage capitalism with boom/bust cycles is good for the community and customers too? At least for the 1% it's doing great. The point is that a "Local" government deciding on how many of one kind of business shows up in one spot isn't optimizing from the top (you could consider that the state or federal government). Instead you could consider it optimizing it from the middle. The local people are electing offi…
Having lived in the USSR, I certainly prefer late stage capitalism.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somehow the idea of perpetually paying property taxes and land value taxes doesn't sound appealing to me, especially since businesses already pay taxes. I don't understand the argument of designing a system to hurt a specific business type such as low value businesses. If there's a loophole such as lack of sales tax for car washes, fix that, but let the playing field remain even. If desirable high value businesses ar…
> I don't understand the argument of designing a system to hurt a specific business type such as low value businesses. The argument is that good business spots are a limited community resource that it makes sense to tax, like radio spectrum. If you can make good use of the space you're taking up, go ahead, but you should compete fairly with other uses of the space. If anything taxing space use makes more sense than t…
> The argument is that good business spots are a limited community resource that it makes sense to tax, like radio spectrum. If you can make good use of the space you're taking up, go ahead, but you should compete fairly with other uses of the space.
If it's really such a prime desirable spot then that would drive up the value of the land to the point that the low value business wouldn't have been able to afford it?
I don't understand saying it's such valuable land and detaching that from what a business was actually able to pay for it.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#415I 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…
> for a depreciating asset.
I don't see a correlatiopn between depreciation and the cleaning of the asset. My body for example started to depreciate after it was appr. 30 years old, but I still wash it every day. I think cleaning is an operational expense that does not support the lifespan of the object, it merely maintains an experience threshold.
And about experience, I also never washed my car until I got kids: car washes are an experience in its own right nowadays.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of land value tax is to charge the same taxes on an empty lot as to a building close by on the same sized lot. Under regular property taxes a speculator might buy a building, tear it down, and sit on the vacant lot for years, as a vacant lot is worth less and so lowers their taxes. With a land value tax they pay the same money either way, which may be higher overall - the general expectation is denser citie…
The problem with your comment is that you're appealing to a phrase, "land value tax", that isn't original to you. The definition you want to give to it is not compatible with the definition that everyone else uses. (And indeed, isn't even connected to the concept of "land value", making it unclear why you'd want to use those words.) This allows you to avoid the logical inconsistency in what counts as land value that…
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Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#417Well, I remember a story about a car wash that could explain why someone would want to own one...
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 abo…
Yeah, car washing, a business that is infamous for its enormous externalities...
Having a slab of asphalt in the middle of a city instead of something more useful, like an office building, shops, or a block of flats, is a negative externality.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s wrong with that argument? Doesn’t getting more money from the user mean that the user is choosing to pay more, which reveals their preference?
*In a healthy competitive market with a consumer-base that's well educated on potential consequences of their purchases. I do agree with the principle that a space-hogging marginally profitable business is detrimental to a community. Just that the opposite is not necessarily true; profitability does not imply beneficiality. Humans do not fit the model of "rational self-interested agent" commonly applied for economic…
"Any rational group would pool resources and have a single org do the research and share it with everyone. Oops we've reinvented a government."
I thought you where talking about Google Maps reviews but OK.
Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
#420Well, I remember a story about a car wash that could explain why someone would want to own one...
chemistry teachers' salary is too low?