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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?

#281

Post by Lammy »

UncleEntity wrote: post #268
Lammy wrote: post #261

> Such “destination” facilities can offer […] electric vehicle charging This seems like the most likely reason to me. It's a way to hold on to land in a way that normalizes gas-station-like traffic patterns without the "gas station" stigma. They can be easily converted in the future once electric cars are a large enough percentage of cars that everyone will come to accept fueling as a 30-minute activity instead of a…

IDK, I used to drive all over the Phoenix valley pre-covid in my cab and most of new business construction I would see was either a car wash or coffee shop. I was messing around on google maps one day and there was something crazy like seven starbucks within reasonable walking distance of my apartment including two in the same shopping center. I always thought the car wash construction boom had something to do with w…

Anecdote: I went to a Starbucks just today (in a Tesla!) that had a huge bank of superchargers outside and zero seating inside.

I'm sure the beancounters love the idea of everyone using Starbucks as their 30-minute car-fueling-and-now-also-drinks stop. It solves all of the (from the corporate point of view) downsides of running an actual store with, like, chairs and shit. It practically guarantees each "seat" turns over in that amount of time since the act of showing up to use the charger implies they have somewhere else to be. Nobody's sat there for hours on their laptop. No problematic h̵o̵m̵e̵l̵e̵s̵s̵ ̵h̵o̵u̵s̵e̵l̵e̵s̵s̵ unhoused people shooting up in the restroom unless they happen to be living out of an $80000 car. Corporate wet dream lol

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#282

Post by muti »

henriquez wrote: post #253
pixl97 wrote: post #247

Earlier 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"

I’m not a free market maximalist. I just don’t see how some random local politician is more qualified to determine how many car washes are permissible than local business owners who have bought and permitted car wash businesses. And for whatever it’s worth there aren’t nearly enough car washes where I live.

A politician may be more or less qualified than the business owner, but they don't have the obvious conflict of interest and are more likely to act in the interest of the locality as a whole

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#283

Post by gameman144 »

pixl97 wrote: post #246
para_parolu wrote: post #230

Earlier 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…

Are boom/bust cycles unique to capitalism? China is going through a pretty big bust and is hardly a capitalist role model.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#284

Post by ghodith »

Barrin92 wrote: post #264
philwelch wrote: post #258

Earlier 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.

So the fix for over-regulation is more regulation, got it.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#285

Post by etothepii »

_heimdall wrote: post #250
mdasen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land value taxes aren't about destroying natural land to extract value. The point of taxing the value of the land in urban areas is that a lot of the time places essentially squat on land that could be better used. A car wash building will have a low assessed value for its improvements compared to a biotech building. For example, in my city we have a carwash with its improvements valued at $400,000 and a biotech buil…

Thanks for all the details! Limiting a land value tax to densely populated areas is a great detail here. Sorry if I end up with a long list of follow-up questions here, this is really interesting. So my main concern related to destruction of natural land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you have to pay the tax anyway. In dense areas that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but it would stil…

The key point is that the value of the land is almost exclusively a function of other people's work.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#286

Post by beede »

greedo wrote: post #158
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live in a place where roads are salted, washing your car is generally recommended to reduce rusting and paint damage. I don't go to the car wash often and I only use the one at my local gas station, but it's rare that I go there and there aren't already at least two cars in line. And I live in a very low population density area. At 1 car every 14 minutes on average, a single bay will easily clear $1,000/day of…

If any of the fancy new car washes in my town were only clearing $1k/day, they'd be folding shop pretty quickly. I don't know where you live, but the wash by me (JetSplash) does between 500-1000 cars a day at over $20 a pop. So you're off by a magnitude or more.

1000 cars in 12 hours is 42 seconds each. Does JetSplash really move them through a single stall that fast? The wash I go to in the spring (salt removal) takes about 600 seconds. Just asking since that makes it more like a factor of 2 than 10.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#287

Post by ks2048 »

laughing_man wrote: post #280

A whole article that doesn't touch on the real reason there are so many car washes, laundromats, and nail salons. It's because the cars aren't the only thing being cleaned. If you have a lot of illicit cash that needs to wind up in your bank account, these are the kinds of places you need to own.

I thought part of it was that these are things that can't be replaced with online shopping.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#288

Post by Newlaptop »

pixl97 wrote: post #247
henriquez wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re advocating a Chinese Communist Party model or what? A central authority determines what the market should be vs. what the market _is?_

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 positions forever. Raise prices, lower wages, provide poor service - it doesn't matter, their buddies on the city council will guarantee no one is allowed to open a competing business.

If you want to protect the lower class and middle class, you don't want to hand the elite a tool to turn their business into a local monopoly for the price of a campaign contribution.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#289

Post by Turing_Machine »

mdasen wrote: post #233
_heimdall wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you see a solution here of higher property taxes, is it focused on the raw land value or on the value of "improvements?" I've never been a fan of taxing the value of raw land, mainly because it creates incentives for destroying natural land and extracting as much value as possible from the space. Taxing structures based on the expected economic value can make sense, though even then if its a business there are m…

Land value taxes aren't about destroying natural land to extract value. The point of taxing the value of the land in urban areas is that a lot of the time places essentially squat on land that could be better used. A car wash building will have a low assessed value for its improvements compared to a biotech building. For example, in my city we have a carwash with its improvements valued at $400,000 and a biotech buil…

> For example, in my city we have a carwash with its improvements valued at $400,000 and a biotech building with its improvements valued at $275,000,000.

That's well and good, but, you know, people still want to wash their cars, and probably don't feel like driving 30 miles out of town to do it.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#290

Post by _heimdall »

Retric wrote: post #277
_heimdall wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for all the details! Limiting a land value tax to densely populated areas is a great detail here. Sorry if I end up with a long list of follow-up questions here, this is really interesting. So my main concern related to destruction of natural land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you have to pay the tax anyway. In dense areas that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but it would stil…

> So my main concern related to destruction of natural land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you have to pay the tax anyway. There’s no need to limit land value taxes based on density as that’s what’s giving land its value. With the property if the tax is say 0.2%. An acre of farmland worth in rural Idaho worth 20k would be assessed as being worth 20k in a land value tax and an acre of swamp mi…

> The farmland’s 40$/year in taxes isn’t pushing anyone to sell

I don't think that's an easy assumption to make. Cost of living, average income, and average plot size are very different in rural areas. I don't know Idaho so I can't speak to land value there, but I can say farmable land in rural Alabama goes for between $1k and $6k per acre depending on the land. If you really want to farm it for anything more than a homestead, 40+ acres is a minimum IMO. On the high end that works out to $480/year, but with an average income in the area closer to $25k/year that number isn't insignificant when its a tax just for the right to continue to own land I already bought. Add to that the extreme challenge of even breaking even in farming today, I'd be impressed if anyone farming 40 acres in rural Alabama could reliably turn $25k in profit each year.

Related to that while we're at it, what is the government's justification for taxing the value of land I own outright? Are we classifying land and property ownership as a privilege rather than a right? And in a rural area where land isn't changing hands as frequently and farmland can often sit for sale for months or years, how does the government accurately assess value? In my own experience land value in rural areas is only really adjusted when new structures are built or a specific parcel changes hands, but maybe that is handled differently elsewhere.

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