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Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

bloomberg.com

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Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#391

Post by raincole »

atrus wrote: post #168
logifail wrote: post #89

> 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…

> 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...

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#392

Post by godelski »

hansvm wrote: post #207
godelski wrote: post #190

How does an article like this not mention that if you rent you probably don't have a water spigot and area you can wash your own car. I'm not saying this is causal, but it seems like a reasonable question that I'd want addressed. Is it related? Bloomberg has not previously been shy about discussing the decreasing rate of home ownership and renting.

Actually, why don't apartments offer a spigot and outlet somewhere nearby where you can park a car? In my mind, it's kind of like how above $20/hr or so (and >= 5ish employees), it's a no-brainer for businesses to pay for lunch. It's more cost effective for the business to pay, and it results in less dead time and more camaraderie. The experience of automatic or manual car washes is bad; your car doesn't get that cle…

I guess technically I have had a spigot in some apartments I've been in. But I'd need like a 200 ft hose to reach my car and I'm not sure how I'd wash it without getting every other car wet and block all my neighbors while doing so. But other than that, I guess I totally could have been a main character and cleaned my car "at home."

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#393

Post by bdjsiqoocwk »

lmm wrote: post #351
dinp wrote: post #340

Earlier 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…

> a profitable business is probably one that's serving the community well

This argument reminds of the argument googlers to explain why placing paid ads ahead of organic results is better for the user: they say thay if someone can pay more for an ad than means that can get more money from the user, and therefore the user likes it more. Lol

No, profit is profit, it doesn't mean anything else.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#394

Post by mewpmewp2 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #72
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So buy all the other carwashes in the area, offer them some money in a nice way, or if this doesn't work, guess you just have to do it the hard way.

Probably way easier and more scalable to setup something offshore than doing a scheme that can literally be thwarted by a guy with a clipboard standing outside

You would need to get all of the cash offshore then first, right.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#395

Post by avidiax »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #354

I don't understand why we can't just let the market decide which businesses make sense based on their revenue vs. leasing the land. Presumably if car washes are so profitable it's because consumers want to use them, so why are we artificially restricting their expansion? It also provides a free subsidy to existing car washes who get to charge higher prices than they would in a competitive market. Restrictions to ente…

Imagine, for a moment, an even freer market.

Someone opens a car wash in a central area. They self-declare a tax value for the land and its improvements.

We also allow that anyone can forcibly buy that land by paying that same self-declared tax value + X%. The sale can't be blocked.

We've ended the monopoly of land ownership, and imposed a free market on land purchasing.

Car washes that are a waste of the land they are placed on will get bought out and converted to other uses. If they are not, they will remain.

This, by the way, is very close to a land value tax, and all we've done is force a fair appraisal of potential value for a parcel, rather than the current, possibly underutilized value.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#396

Post by sethammons »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #360
_heimdall wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the land go untaxed until there are improvements? If not, the raw land value itself is being taxed.

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

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#397

Post by suslik »

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…

This completely ignores issues like food addiction (which is a hell of a drug - some of the, say, top obesity candidate genes are expressed in brain), an overabundance of sugar in the diet, and lack of anything that resembles a decent food culture. It is absolutely possible to maintain a quick and healthy diet on low budget - there are infinite reddit threads and substack articles on the topic.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#398

Post by oreally »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #333
gameman144 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is China not a capitalist country? It does not appear to be a heavily planned economy, at least not in the past few decades.

Yes it is ever since it opened up, granting some exceptions to inwardness, recent bits of geopolitics and socialist moves.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#399

Post by orojackson »

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned rinseless washes like Optimum No Rinse (ONR) as an option for washing your car. You dilute it with water in a 1:256 solution in a bucket, and then you use a slightly-dripping microfiber towel or a rinseless-wash-specific sponge to clean your car. The rinseless wash itself acts as its own drying aid, so you can wipe your car dry with a microfiber drying towel afterwards without having to rinse off the car (hence the term rinseless).

I would say this is the cheapest, simplest, and (arguably) safest way to wash your car, especially if you buy the rinseless wash concentrate by the gallon. It's easy enough that it allows me to wash my car nearly every week. I only need about 3 gallons of water and 1.5 fluid ounces of ONR to fully wash one car.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#400

Post by brhsagain »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #393
lmm wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> a profitable business is probably one that's serving the community well This argument reminds of the argument googlers to explain why placing paid ads ahead of organic results is better for the user: they say thay if someone can pay more for an ad than means that can get more money from the user, and therefore the user likes it more. Lol No, profit is profit, it doesn't mean anything else.

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?
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