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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?

#591

Post by Gormo »

orlp wrote: post #576
Gormo wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans do not fit the model of "rational self-interested agent" commonly applied for economic models. They generally do -- the misalignment comes from analyzing people's behavior according to presumptive interests which have been externally attributed to them, instead of observing behavior in order to ascertain what people's interests actually are. > Gambling and addictive substances are two hugely profitable busin…

I take it you view drug / gambling addicts not as people with a mental health issue making irrational decisions, but rather fully rational people that prefer "short-term pleasure over long-term stability"?

Absolutely. People make rational decisions to fulfill the motivations they actually have. But sometimes people, being complex creatures, have multiple conflicting motivations, where fulfilling one impedes another, which leads to psychological and emotional distress. So mental health does come into it, but as a matter of reconciling conflicting parts of ones own psyche, not as a matter of overcoming irrationality.

Or, to put it another way, the irrationality is a matter of having contradictory desires in the first place; choosing to act upon one and dismiss the other resolves the irrationality. The fact that some people make the trade-off in the opposite direction that you would doesn't make them irrational, it just demonstrates that people are different.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#592

Post by Gormo »

Gormo wrote: post #562
gitonup wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> amounts to having political control over land use decisions This exists in America, in ways that have generally escaped the label of "Communism". The most basic example of this most will be familiar with is zoning laws, but there is significant precedent otherwise. There will always be a gradient of control, and claiming that a singular government action in expansion is therefore communist is not intellectually hon…

s people object to zoning laws for exactly the same reason. Have Jacobs won renown for pointing out exactly how zoning laws undermined the emergent nature of cities, and destroyed value for their residents. Whatever label you call it by, the critique is the same: central planning is far worse than organic emergence.

That should be "Some people" and "Jane Jacobs". Apologies for the phone-induced typos.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#593

Post by alexb_ »

_heimdall wrote: post #561
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thos…

> 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. There's a real risk in attempting to define exactly what "socially suboptimal" uses for land are. Everyone will have a different…

> There's a real risk in attempting to define exactly what "socially suboptimal" uses for land are. Everyone will have a different opinion on how they want land to be used.

The market is making a decision here via prices, not any centralized power.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#594

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

idiotsecant wrote: post #571
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That explains why there's half a dozen self storage buildings within 5 feet of my apartment.

I am trying to imagine what kind of lovecraftian geometry you have the misfortune to live in

I'm barely even exaggerating. There's literally 5 within walking distance.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#595

Post by logifail »

Terretta wrote: post #501
ViktorRay wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#596

Post by _heimdall »

alexb_ wrote: post #593
_heimdall wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There's a real risk in attempting to define exactly what "socially suboptimal" uses for land are. Everyone will have a different…

> There's a real risk in attempting to define exactly what "socially suboptimal" uses for land are. Everyone will have a different opinion on how they want land to be used. The market is making a decision here via prices, not any centralized power.

Money isn't a great analog for "socially suboptimal" use, if anything money acts an analog for the most greedy use.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#597

Post by Gormo »

lesuorac wrote: post #565
Gormo wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it interesting that we have sayings like this, and sayings like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." How can the market be irrational? People either are purchasing enough of these services to make the business viable, or they are not. > Because the market doesn't price in externalities. Legal liability for harmful externalities factors directly into the market for insurance and…

Business are in general not solvent in their first years. Even some business such as Uber took 15 years to generate a profit [1]. However, the saying about "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." is that even if you can point out that say Enron / Wirecard / FTX are fraudulent, good luck making any money on that. Michael Burry nearly messed up his timing for '08 and could've lost to an inves…

> Business are in general not solvent in their first years. Even some business such as Uber took 15 years to generate a profit [1].

This is true, but it's not clear to me how it relates to either the discussion of whether markets are rational or the discussion of whether common-law liability is more effective than preemptive regulation. Can you explain the connection?

If the implication is that people choosing to bear risk in the expectation of achieving a long-term profit is irrational, then I'm not sure how to respond, because this seems almost axiomatically false to me. In fact, given that we live in an observably stochastic universe, where cause-and-effect is best represented by probability models and not deterministic logic, I'd regard that rationality itself includes probabilistic decision-making, and that attempting to preempt all risk is itself highly irrational.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#598

Post by Gormo »

_heimdall wrote: post #596
alexb_ wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a real risk in attempting to define exactly what "socially suboptimal" uses for land are. Everyone will have a different opinion on how they want land to be used. The market is making a decision here via prices, not any centralized power.

Money isn't a great analog for "socially suboptimal" use, if anything money acts an analog for the most greedy use.

It might not be a great analogue, but it's the best one we've got. What people are willing to spend on things, in comparison to each other, is the most direct indicator of aggregate preference within society we have. It's vastly more valid as an indicator than anything generated by any political process.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#599

Post by mikhailfranco »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #384
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real business of car washes is real estate. Is there any evidence of this? Companies like Mister Carwash lease nearly all their properties and when they purchase plots seem to alway try to do a sale and lease. Their latest results claim they run 436 sites and lease 427: https://ir.mistercarwash.com/news-events/press-releases/deta...

>The real business of car washes is real estate. What I see in both car washes and the storage business suggested by one of the child posters is low-labor cash flow. I can't speak for all geographies, but locally what I observe is car washes are built on low-value land where these new heavily automated car washes have got to be a cash cow once they are paid off, especially with monthly subscriptions. I do unfortunate…

One pattern I have seen in the UK is temporary manual car washes operating in former gasoline stations.

Firstly, the location, visibility and site layout are obviously perfect.

Secondly, the old brown-field gas station has sludge-filled underground tanks that cost a lot to remove, and do a full environmental clean-up. There are long delays to wait for a deep-pocketed developer, or for the site value to rise. In the meantime, lease it out to a bunch of enterprising migrants (in UK, often E.Europeans).

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#600

Post by jrm4 »

margalabargala wrote: post #222
jrm4 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 necessar…

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."

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