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Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

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Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#541

Post by bombcar »

jen_h wrote: post #328

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 “str…

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.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#542

Post by bombcar »

diogenescynic wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#543

Post by bombcar »

> 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.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#544

Post by throwaway22032 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #321
throwaway22032 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. More than 36% of Americans are clinically obese. There are a _lot_ of really short sighted people out there.

That's due to poverty... calorie dense, highly processed food is cheap as hell due to mass production efficiencies, but high quality food? Groceries? Ain't no one got the money for that, or they live in "food deserts" [1]. For poor kids, it's even worse, because all they have other than sub-par school lunches is whatever microwave meal their parents can afford not just financially but also time-wise. Cooking for a fa…

You will not get fat by eating either low quality or calorie dense food.

You will get fat if you eat more than you need to maintain your weight.

If anything, personal experience, with processed foods it can actually be easier to maintain weight because the calories are known.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#545

Post by GeneralMayhem »

Gormo wrote: post #518
alexb_ wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Land" is shorthand for all of the natural resources on this earth. That means space, but it also means clean air and anything else extracted. Pollution and extraction taxes are different forms of land taxes.

So the proposal is that people should never be able to use the land they own for their own purposes without the threat of being dispossessed because strangers are willing to pay more for it, even if they don't want to sell? That sounds like a horrible situation, and it seems clear why real-world tax systems don't take this approach to its ultimate conclusion. There's also something very objectionable about attempting…

At the risk of feeding a troll... no, that is not the proposal. The proposal is to make it economically unviable to do socially suboptimal things with common resources.

The underlying principle is that land - including natural resources as a whole - is finite. It's a common good owned by humanity as a whole; or, failing that, at least in common by the nation-state in which it falls. Allowing individuals to hoard those finite resources is bad for society.

Under a land-value tax system, individuals can do whatever they want, but they're appropriately charged for their negative externalities. Just like we should have a carbon tax to disincentivize people using the shared natural resource of carbon fixing without a good reason, we should have a land tax to disincentivize people using the shared natural resource of flat, arable land without a good reason. You can choose to pay your taxes and do nothing with the land, if you have another source of wealth to make up for it - effectively, you need to express to society just how much it's worth it to you to sit on that land doing nothing, and the way that we express the strength of our convictions in a market economy is with dollars.

> There's also something very objectionable about attempting to use taxation as a tool to manipulate behavior and engineer outcomes.

The goal here is not to manipulate behavior for its own sake, it's to use the power of the state to correct for a mispricing in the market. Market forces alone are incapable of correctly pricing deals involving common goods, because most of the people who are implicitly participating in the transaction (i.e., the rest of humanity that is now deprived of that land/air/resource) are not compensated. It's a problem of negative externalities, for which a Pigouvian tax [1] is a perfectly appropriate remedy. In a democracy, the state is how the public as a whole imposes its collective will; having the state "bid" on behalf of the public interest is the most capitalist solution possible to the externalities problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#546

Post by GeneralMayhem »

sethammons wrote: post #396
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The land would be taxed whether it has improvements or not, and in fact would be taxed the same amount whether improved or not. That's how such a tax incentivizes improvement - if you're paying the tax either way, you want to do as much as possible with it to get your money's worth.

Which encourages destruction of natural lands

Only if implemented naively.

The idea of LVT is to put an economic value (i.e. dollar amount) on the fact that you're preventing people from using land. It's a market correction. If you want to express that some values are actually good beyond what the market is equipped to reward, then you need to correct further. In theory, this means that the government - acting on behalf of the public good, or its citizens, or the future of humanity, or whatever your preferred vision for the social contract is - should offer its own contribution to the cost to be paid. In practice, this means there could be a significant tax credit for meaningful nature preserves, commensurate with the value of that preserve. Taken to its limit, this tax credit could mean a negative tax (i.e. subsidy) that's enough to pay for maintaining the land in its natural state, and oh look we just reinvented public parks.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#547

Post by GeneralMayhem »

ejb999 wrote: post #469
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The land would be taxed whether it has improvements or not, and in fact would be taxed the same amount whether improved or not. That's how such a tax incentivizes improvement - if you're paying the tax either way, you want to do as much as possible with it to get your money's worth.

So where do the animals pay their taxes so they have some place to live after we make it economically un-feasible to keep land undeveloped by taxing raw land out of existence?

Animals don't get a vote, but just as the government can forcibly set aside land as parks, the government can subsidize individuals to do so where it would be valuable to the common good.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#548

Post by RussianCow »

ipaddr wrote: post #528
throwaway2037 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a minimum wage job at a car wash? Seriously? Absolutely not.

Yes. And for fast food.. coffee shops and many other minimum wage jobs. Someone is applying to McDonalds over Big Jim's almost edible meat 9 times out of 10.

This needs a source. If you just mean that this is happening because far more people know about McDonald's and are therefore less likely to know that Big Jim's is hiring, then sure, but I don't buy the idea that 9/10 people working low wage jobs are actively thinking about the relative stability of the employers they apply to.

> People will ask friends who work if company is a good place to work.

I 100% agree with this, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#550

Post by galdosdi »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #181

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…

I suggest getting an undercarriage wash once a year at the end of winter if you live where salt is used on roads, to reduce rusting away of your chassis. Still just once a year so you can keep feeling pretty smug about not washing, but, you get most of the benefit of the wash, which is longer rust free body life.

It has quite an impact -- this is why it's much harder to find intact cars older than a couple decades or so in the north as opposed to the desert west.

> Rain and the occasional wet rag is good enough for a depreciating asset.

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