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.
Absolutely. I can think of a few storage units that are in prime real estate locations that make no sense--like right across the street from Oracle Park in San Francisco. Has to be some of the most expensive real estate in the entire city/state and it's being used for storage units...
How about in the heart of San Francisco at Otis and 13th? Then again, the Walgreens at 16th st Bart is still sitting empty, as well as the burger king next door to it, so there's something fucked with incentives and regulations and zoning that means we're not making use of some of the most lucrative real estate in a highly desirable market. Calle 11 on 11th is another that's sitting unused for unknown reasons.
I think there are companies that build/sell turnkey carwashes. I don't think it's very sophisticated to be honest. It's really just a couple of high pressure sprayers, some soap/foaming sprayers, and a track that pulls the car. It's all technology that's been available for decades. I bet there's a factory in China just pumping out car wash components.
You can buy them out of a catalogue, and if you need it in a building I think the building requirements are simpler than most other retail space. I used to work in the railroad industry and even train washes, a much rarer thing than car washes, were purchased practically as turnkey things.
There's a lot of unseen plumbing there, though, mostly underground tanks to handle storing graywater (cities have fairly stringent rules about discharge rate, so you have to store and slowly release a lot of water over time), plus (increasingly these days) reverse osmosis systems and graywater scrubbers for recycling. Most of the cost there goes into construction, not components, of course, but it's considerably more complex a build than older setups.
There’s a car wash in my area that is one of the “upscale” hand wash places. At that point, you’re just paying for people to do the washing and some standard water hookups. No fancy machinery, just a few buildings and some basic equipment.
They also have a giant sign in front of the building stating it’s for lease.
The machinery is all commoditized and the same. Plumbing as a trade has been around for thousands of years. The level of sophistication here is limited.
A lot of money laundering involves traceable transactions, no? The point isn't to hide the transaction but rather have a plausible explanation for it that's difficult or impossible to verify. I'd think a larger issue would be that you can't plausibly charge very much per swipe. I'm betting there's much easier ways to launder cash these days with so many digital goods and services with basically arbitrary profit margins than brick-and-mortar storefronts can provide.
Granted, there are benefits to laundering money with literal cash, but you still want some legitimate money trail even if you don't actually hand over the claimed goods or services—enough at least to cover the actual expenses of the business, i'd presume.
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
Interesting observation. I do use a car wash, not frequently enough as my car is more often dirty than clean, but I have only ever paid cash! For context, I currently live in Austria.
On the contrary, the TV show was inspired by car washes used as drug fronts—not so much money laundering as selling drugs. Cash changes hands, and the attendant gives you a wipe for your dash, but he could just as easily hand you a bag of coke if you'd given him the right amount of cash.
From what I've heard the current way to clean cash is to buy gift cards and then use them to buy items from Amazon/Steam. Sure, the store fronts take a cut but having a 1099 from Valve looks way more legitimate than reporting thousands of dollars of cash.
From what I understand the scheme works like this.
Create a very basic "game" that technically meets Valve's requirements. As long as it runs well enough then it won't be blocked. Have people buy Steam gift cards with cash, then buy the games you have published.
Valve takes 30% and you get a nice check with a verified source of funds from a legitimate company.
In the northern foothills here bordering Phoenix, Arizona, to the north, there are an understandable number of automated carwashes.
However, i've found no manual (pressure wash sort) carwashes, which are easy to find in California and Illinois, for two examples. I don't know why this is.
Could it be that single family homeownership is higher there?
I can kind of speak for some of L.A.'s use of manual car washes. There's many who live in apartments or places that don't have places to wash at home. Manual car washes fill the void for people that want to clean their own car but don't have space.
it might be. It might also be a water conservation thing, somehow, but I can't see how that would work unless they filter the water used in teh carwashes that are automatic and reuse them in some way not feasible with the power-wash-for-quarters sorts of stalls.
The pay/pressure wash systems I've ever seen are all older, I don't know how many new ones they're building. I suspect automatic washers are cheap "enough" now that you can't build a new pay to wash that comes out substantially cheaper.
When I was a kid it was $2 for the power wash for quarters type, and $10 for automatic or by hand, now it's $8 for the automatic decades later.
In Chicago, it's always good to rinse the salt off your car to prevent rust. I recall doing this several times during many winters there. Never had a problem with rust on any car I owned.
Yes but they still degrade relatively quickly when managed correctly so a burst of pollutants whenever it rains is better than a constant low level exposure from people washing their cars all the time.
Regions where it rains frequently like the PNW have rain gardens, vegetated swales, catch basins/filters, and other mitigation strategies all over the place whereas e.g. California might just have them throughout the drainage system like at the end of the LA river.
Consider this: If I were to say, “In Tokyo, people stand on the left side of the escalator and walk on the right side, opposite to Osaka,” would you automatically assume I'm a Tokyo resident? Probably not, right?
Had the initial commenter simply replaced “In my city […]” with the actual city name, it would likely have been interpreted as general knowledge they picked up along the way. Sure, some might mistakenly assume they hail from or currently reside in said city, but in reality, it’s not a big deal. Take me, for instance—I live in Copenhagen and I’m 100% sure no one will be able to do anything useful with that information.
Providing context is key, especially in online forums like this. Simply stating the city name would have enriched the discussion far more than leaving it ambiguous.
> would you automatically assume I'm a Tokyo resident? Probably not, right
For something that you can pick up just by visiting? Maybe not. For information like this, about specific bylaws that are relevant for homeowners or car owners? Yeah absolutely I would assume they live there
I think generally it should not be allowed. A big component of soap is phosphates, which promote algae growth so you really don't want it in your rivers.
Some cities have combined or separated sewer systems. Even if combined, it may be designed to overflow during heavy rain, so it's not a guarantee that car wash water with dirt, soap and oil will not go into into a stream somewhere although in that case you're also sending literal shit there. Also when combined, there may still be old infrastructure that drains to a stream or river so a blanket ban is a good idea.
Typically a car wash would be required to have an oil-water separator (with maintenance records and occasional checks) and discharge effluent to the sanitary sewer. Not sure about everywhere but in Vancouver (I have experience working in water treatment there) you also need to have the car wash covered and send collected rainwater to the storm sewer.
Perhaps there could be a middle ground where you're allowed to wash in your driveway but only with a specific soap, and not allowed to degrease your engine bay. There's basically no way to enforce that though,.
Also might as well note here that in Vancouver storm drains that connect to the storm sewer have little fish stenciled by them.
> I think generally it should not be allowed. A big component of soap is phosphates, which promote algae growth so you really don't want it in your rivers
That's fair, but it doesn't explain why the bylaw won't even let you rinse the mud off your car with nothing but water
I operate an auto detailing shop. As part of that I've done some research and spoken with my local city (100k+ pop.) officials about this. It's actually quite logical.
First, there's a distinction between sewer vs. stormwater. Sewer lines go to a treatment facility that's built specifically to take all the bad stuff out of the water before flushing that treated water into your local streams. Washing your car into a sewer drain, all good.
Stormwater drains shuttle water directly into your streams.
Stormwater drainage is purpose-built to handle the overflow rain during storms, and only that. In fact, the first goal of stormwater management is to not drain it at all! You want the stormwater to flow through your local ecosystem naturally, generally as groundwater. Nonetheless, storms conspire to drench our non-porous surfaces (asphalt, concrete, etc.) at a rate or duration above the designed for drainage of the system, resulting in overflow. Overflow leads to things like flooding or public safety hazards for cars driving on undrained roads, so a secondary goal of stormwater management becomes shuttling excess water out of the local ecosystem.
What's all this have to do with washing the mud off your car? Well, the first goal of stormwater management is to keep it in your local ecosystem. So, if you can ensure the runoff from washing your car goes into your grass or a specifically designed catch basin, then you're all good. But, if you wash it off into the stormwater drain, well then you're using that drain for a purpose it wasn't built to serve. Your water is neither excess nor should it bypass your local ecosystem. As far-fetched as it may sound, that mud may have local nutrients, pollen, chemicals, etc. that could serve your local ecosystem, and by bypassing that you are disrupting your ecosystem's natural cycles.
A note to the astute reader that says well, we already disrupt our ecosystems with other human activities. Yes, you are correct. That doesn't mean that we can't nor shouldn't take actions to minimize or eliminate further disruptions when they are within our sphere of control. We must strive to find a balance in ecological systems.
There's also an enforcement aspect, too - it becomes significantly harder for police to determine the difference between "I was hosing it down" and "I was hosing it down and washing it with soap" so they just ban all of it.
> Some cities have combined or separated sewer systems.
I wonder how many cities still have a combined system. At least where I live, I could totally see the amount of water coming from the sky regularly beating the amount coming from household drains. Along those lines, our city is spending money replacing private sewer laterals (normally a 10-20K job the homeowner is responsible for) just to cut down on the water intrusion the old laterals (especially party lines) let into the sewer. It's cheaper to pay for the new laterals than it is to build a larger treatment plant.
>I think generally it should not be allowed. A big component of soap is phosphates, which promote algae growth so you really don't want it in your rivers.
Shouldn't we ban people showering under the same logic? I use about the same amount of soap to wash my car as I do in the shower, but I shower a lot more often.
I'm in the UK and our privatised water companies seem to mostly just pump stuff into the nearest river or coastline, untreated. Treating the sewage or building infrastructure would eat into their dividends and bonuses. Trebles all round!
It makes more sense if your run-off and sewage are treated separately - assuming the car washes get theirs treated.
My understanding is that the UK has a combined system where rainwater and waste go into the same system and is all treated the same. More because of history than because anyone now thinks that is a good idea. Maybe someone who knows more about this could confirm?
In some cities in the PNW this law is to protect the fish and wildlife, because storm drains connect to the streams. You're allowed to wash your car in your driveway so long as it drains onto your lawn or the sewer.
> In my city you're not allowed to wash your car in your driveway
How does this even get enforced? Are the police driving by everyone’s house regularly, looking for those dastardly hoses? Or do they rely on nosey neighbors ratting on each other? I can’t imagine this is the most important crime for the local law enforcement to be investigating.
In Sweden washing a car at home is discouraged and depending on how you read the law can be illegal (it is not illegal per se to wash a car at home, but it is illegal to to let out untreated water into nature - and since waste water from car washing is not untreated and probably contains oil and metals, it is most likely illegal on this provision).
Enforcement is on a council-by-council basis, but of course in urban areas I imagine this is pretty hard to enforce. In rural settings it must be pretty much impossible. Having said that, I haven't really seen many people at all washing their car at home. Maybe it depends where you live, if you have neighbours who do it a lot it probably feels like everyone does it.
In the last few years, there have been a load of "wash your own car" car wash stations opening up. They're cheap (you can do the car for <100kr - $10 or so), way less than the drive in station, and have things you wouldn't have at home (e.g. cleaning underneath the car, handy for washing off the salt that has come off the road in winter). Not really enforcement but a pretty effective way of nudging people to doing the "right thing".
In my area it’s mostly done by the water department itself. They have people that drive around documenting violations, and the owner is directly billed. This is mostly done overnight.
They also have a hotline for tattletales and HOAs and the police can also report you.
IMO someone would have to be pretty anal retentive to get bent out of shape over just hosing down your car with a hose. That's not really any different than what happens when it rains hard. My local jurisdiction only cares about the car wash soap you use. Even then, they just ask that we use phosphate-free soap, not that we don't wash the car in the driveway at all.
I can wash my car in my driveway, but last summer when my city implemented water use controls (due to drought conditions), they didn't allow it. Oddly enough, they didn't restrict commercial car washes.
You'll never need to worry about this if you try using Optimum No Rinse waterless wash. It cleans and details your entire car with 2.5gal of water. I've been using thus for over two years now and will not wash our cars any other way.
I've been thinking about this same phenomenon. I reside in Norway, where, interestingly, five different car washes opened in 2023 within a 2 km radius of my local neighborhood. Remarkably, four of these are clustered within a 300m stretch inside a commercial park. Our local area has a population of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 people.
Each car wash is operated by a different entity, offering unique apps and subscription plans.
It's hard to imagine this being profitable given the circumstances. But what do I know, I wash my own car.
Honestly I bought freezer food bags recently and even they had a bloody app. Each one is stamped with a QR code and you can use the app to record what's in each one. Absolutely bizarre. I continue to use a Sharpie.
There is one by me that lets you pay wirelessly with an app. They have an unlimited wash subscription plan you can only get with that. I am not really sure how it works (bluetooth?) but I guess it would speed things up.
I would try it to puzzle it out, but its one of those spinnybrush antenna destroyers and I'm not gonna risk it.
I would have assumed its from the rise of gig workers using private cars. Uber/Lyft need to keep cars pretty clean to not be dinged stars, and even package and food delivery can create more mess which may require cleaning (but mostly taxi service I think).
I skimmed the article and don’t see mention of that?
Unless you are rich taxi/uber is not an alternative to car ownership. (rich call it a limo). Those are alternatives for when something else covers most of your needs but once in a while it is lacking. If you own a car you need a 'i'm drunk' option. If you take transit you need a 'i'm going where transit doesn't or is too slow' option.
I'm not saying taking an uber everywhere is an alternative to having a car. It's part of the system. There's public transport (tube, DLR, overground, trams, busses), there's rental bikes, rental scooters, there's uber/taxi, there's walking. You use the "car ownership alternative" (or a combination of them) that works for each given situation.
I think the point the OP is making is that the burden of car ownership in somewhere like London is already very high. So those who can do without by and large do. The remaining folks who do still have a car do so for a reason (job, primarily) and are unlikely to get rid of it just because Uber exists.
When people use an Uber instead of owning a car, they will never ever sit in a car that hasn't been recently washed. When they drive their own car, the threshold for good enough is so much lower for all but the most fanatic washers. Chances are their own car, on average, will not only have seen more time pass since the last wash, but also more miles (more miles will certainly be much closer to a tie though)
If you can get by without a car where Uber makes sense, you likely didn’t need a car anyways nor drive it often enough to wash more than seasonally.
You aren’t commuting daily in an Uber, nor driving kids to school and activities with all their gear and car seats. Those are the activities which might have moved the needle on needing Uber level frequency of car washes (but even then, I assume an Uber is washed every other day or so, or perhaps I just have a cynical view of humanity keeping the inside of taxis clean).
> I would have assumed its from the rise of gig workers using private cars. Uber/Lyft need to keep cars pretty clean
True, I believe that’s the reason too, a while ago I used to park in an underground parking with a free washing area, the car next to me used to be clean all the time and the guy washes it every day, one time I asked him about such dedication, he said simply he is an uber driver!
>> I would have assumed its from the rise of gig workers using private cars.
It is not in West/Fargo. There is almost no rideshare capacity (there are a couple people) and the taxis use their own wash. Even Google does not capture the new 12 washes that have appeared in the last 18 months. Some of them can't staff and are closed much of the time. Especially during winter, when you want washes, it seems like land improvement. Add sewer, power, water, network to undeveloped land as a "business". Hold for a decade. Profit.
The last cab company I worked for had a car wash in the yard that usually managed to make the car dirtier than it was before it was washed. But that was their 'standard', it was free and I really didn't care so...
All the dealerships out here give free car washes that are better than the automated. Granted, they are clustered in specific areas and sometimes there's a wait...because it's a dealership with paying service customers.
This surprised me when I was on my local government and we had an application for a 24/7 carwash. When I asked why they thought it would be profitable to be open overnight with staff they said that the local car dealerships would book dozens of cars in every night, they were actually busier from 9pm to 6am than the rest of the day.
Year after Year, I kept thinking this was a fad and would crash. But years go by, and now they are calling it a 'boom'. 14 billion dollar market. For Car Washes?
Isn't this an indicator that economy is fine, people are fine, since they can spend this type of money on car washes? How can something this worthless be booming, if people are struggling.
My local car was has a $20/month subscription for unlimited washes. These aren't exactly luxury services--they're priced similar to a Netflix plan. If you have a car, it's worth it if you value our time at all.
It is so simple to come up with excuses. It is raining. No need to go. We are in spring and here it means the dirty season, no need to go. Or it is negative temperature outside, it probably does not dry...
salt on the roads destroys cars. If my car can last a year longer before falling apart that is a lot of monea saved for me. I drive my cars to the end most of the time. Plus a clean car makes my wife happa which is itself important.
It takes roughly five minutes depending on how long the queue is, so when I'm out running errands I'll stop in. Keeps the road crud (and most importantly, salt) off the car so it lasts longer.
Only if you insist on a spotless car… we haven't actually cleaned ours in years to basically no detriment, and we're im the Central Valley. I'm inclined to agree with gp.
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 revenue.
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.
Yeah, not around here though. My estimate is based on how long a wash takes and allowing for people not washing as frequently at night at the wash attached to my local gas station. This is a rural area.
However my neighbor used to own a chain of car washes in the suburbs and going by his 11,000 sq-ft house, I'm guessing it was pretty profitable!
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.
I don't know the gear JetSplash uses, but the link below looks roughly the same as what I've seen them use. They claim 400-800 car per day.
I've seen other sites state up to 120 cars per hour. Assuming 750/day @ $20 wash, that's an annual gross of about $5.5M. I doubt they're running at that rate consistently, just at peak. But I would be surprised if $2M wasn't the average in town. That's pretty good for a low labor enterprise.
Psychics are lucrative. They prey on people in the most desperate times of their life and often make off with their life savings. That's why there's one right next to the Louboutin store in Beverly Hills.
"Credit card only" is a sure sign of money laundering: it's a way to game the cash vs credit ratio.
(Edit: maybe "sure sign" is a little bit hasty, but I think the other possible reasons for a "credit card only" sign are actually worse morally than money laundering)
Not joking, Ivy League graduates who might have went into finance, have started raising capital and funding small cash returning businesses. It is now seen as a legitimate career path, sometimes called a "search fund". An HBS graduate might aspire to buy and run a blue collar business as a way to understand the market.
There are private equity funds that might aquire 50 of these businesses at 2-5M each, roll them into an index, and sell the index. Same with doctors/dentist practices.
Its not that much different from raising 10M (with nothing but an idea) to build some generic type of software that already has a market. A big secret, raising huge amounts of capital to be an "Entrepreneur", isnt really Entrepreneurship, its being placed into a management position of executing on an already existing (usually proven) idea.
VCs certainly see it this way, and so do the pedigreed people they fund. The only people thinking its different, are the ones on the outside looking in.
In my area, the home of Tommy Car Wash[1], they are explicitly testing out how many car washes in a city are sustainable given a certain population size, so yeah we (Holland, MI) are surrounded by them.
Because our country is ultimately designed and developed by urban sprawl madmen with a highway fetish and zero vision for a better way for humans to live and operate.
I love how we hyper fixate on stupid questions about car washes while pretending like car dependency isn't the problem.
Some of each. There are people opposing efforts to make things better. However there also is a lot that ever step makes things better for someone in particular who thus cares more than the more generic society that got worse.
The moves to the suburbs was orchestrated. The moves to newer suburbs from the existing ones was orchestrated. The encouragement of driving everywhere was orchestrated.
Not to cause us to need more car washes. But it was by design.
I have actually briefly considered opening a car wash.
They seem like just about one of the easiest businesses to run. Minimal employees, low variable costs, likely a reasonable long term investment in the actual rental estate.
In many ways, this the same as gas stations, convenience stores, and CVS/rite-aid/walgreens. People don’t want to go out if their way.
That might actually be part of it. If you go to YouTube, things like laundromats, vending machines and CAR WASHES are pretty big with the passive income "movement".
We're seeing more car washes opening up around here, but I think that is just as much about having the area under services for ages. Now I don't have to wait in line for 45 minutes, or risk a fine for cleaning my car in the drive way (which I don't think you should be doing anyway).
To answer question 1: older people, from my experience. They don't want to have to buy a new car so they take exceedingly good care of their current one. This includes car washes almost weekly.
I used to wash my car every few weeks, but with an unlimited model, I now wash it every few days. It literally takes 2 minutes to pull in and through the car wash.
No doubt, and it seems the Kia EV6 has worse paint quality compared to prior cars I've owned. It's definitely in need of a paint correction. For now though, my water quality at home is terrible, so it's a lesser of two evils for me (due to health reasons, I really don't have the stamina to wash it the right way) The hard water not only makes it hard to wash without spots, but it's a double whammy when my sprinkler system hits my car and spots it up.
I've spent $200 - $350 on car detailing as a service several times now. They drive to your home and work on your car for several hours to get it looking brand new.
As someone who drives an SUV, has dogs in the car frequently, and gets my vehicle muddy on the inside, this is a fantastic service.
A bunch of my neighbors use the exact same service.
$20 is 2 car washes. Around here moo moo car wash chain is all over and you cat get unlimited washes for like $30/month. Anywhere there is a moo-moo’s there is also a line of cars. Some people get obsessed with keeping their cars squeaky clean here.
Why assume there is a line? I spent like $1500 just for the tickets twice last year to take my family of 4 to Disneyland which is mostly standing in line.
me. i went into one of these car washes, got the hard sell from some poor person standing outside, didnt realize it was subscription - to cancel you have to call a phone number between 8 and 5, which of course i forget to do for several weeks ,
I was when I lived in MN. I had a subscription for unlimited car washes (I did the "medium" level). When I commuted in winter I would wash my car at least once a week, sometimes twice. Summer, maybe once every other week. It just took two washes to break even, 3 was coming out ahead. There were times when it was really dirty that I would go through twice back to back.
There was hardly a time there wasn't a short line to go through and many had the subscriptions, you can tell because the attendant just guides you into the track and there was an RFID tag on your windshield and if the attendant didn't have to take payment you knew they had the subscription.
> 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 juristidiction? Assuming all other laws and ordinances are being complied with, and that there is no actual "nuisance", why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide?
Last night I stayed at a hotel very close to London Heathrow Airport. There, on the Bath Road, there are (literally) dozens of hotels, one right next to another. This is a feature not a bug! Apparently, there is lots of demand for hotels at that location, which isn't exactly a surprise. If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right?
Admittedly, the local bus services around the airport which used to be free of charge (prior to 2021) are now chargable, but at less than £2 per trip the services are hardly expensive and are fairly fast and very frequent ... unlike the Hotel Hoppa services which seem primarily designed to rip off unsuspecting visitors.
Also helps keep prices in line. Perhaps a local car wash owner wants to maintain their monopoly (that was actually alluded to, but not greatly discussed, in the article!)
> Especially true in the American two-party system, political parties want to maximize vote allocated to their candidate. Political parties will adjust their platform to comply with the median voters’ demand. The Comparative Midpoints Model represents this idea best: Both political parties will get as close to the competing party’s platform while preserving its own identity.
On the contrary, the ever increasing dysfunction in US politics is largely because the players have hacked their way past the constraints of this model.
Is this in the article? I just read through it twice trying to find a reference to how many were there 10 years ago, but couldn't find anything.
Even if it were true, I'm not sure that that shows there are too many car washes, just that consumer behavior surrounding car washes has changed dramatically in recent years.
> 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 about the ones that don't and the people who subsequently lose their jobs.
It's a fair question to ask if you're building too many of a certain service, especially when the ones that fail leave behind abandoned husks and unemployed people. Ya know, the people that the local politician is supposed to help. Local leaders should be at least thinking about these questions.
> Sure the market will figure out which car washes live. But what about the ones that don't and the people who subsequently lose their jobs
There's a lot going on in your statement to dig through.
The article specifically says these car washes barely add jobs.. but let's ignore that.
When a business opens and starts to hire people, there is no guarantee it will exist long term. When a person applies for a job, they need to do some due diligence researching the business to see if it sounds like something that will be around as long as they want to have a job.
Are you proposing we shouldn't allow "risky" business to start and hire people because there is no certainty they will be around in 1-5 years? Of course that doesn't make any sense.
If a business fails, people will lose their jobs, but that is not a reason to prevent business from starting. In fact, if we did prevent them, those jobs would have never existed!
> When a person applies for a job, they need to do some due diligence researching the business to see if it sounds like something that will be around as long as they want to have a job.
This is a nitpick as I agree with the rest of your comment, but most people are absolutely not qualified to make that assessment. (In fact, it's debatable whether anyone can make that claim with any amount of certainty. Even the most successful investors are often wrong.)
Most people do this. People will work for a brand or company that is well known with a history over something new with everything else being equal. People will ask friends who work if company is a good place to work.
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.
While acknowledging the reality of those externalities, it's also fair to point out that empowering politicians to attempt to override the market and deliberately police the negative outcomes of those externalities in favor of supposed social goods (the determination of which is, in itself, problematic) has never, ever worked in the history of humanity -- though it has been tried over and over in disparate societies around the world.
In practice, the politicians supposed to be looking out for the externality damage instead merely redirect outcomes to benefit themselves and their friends.
The result is invariably worse than whatever damage is wrought by the open and free market.
This is not a failure or shortcoming of any one particular attempt to corral the market towards social good; it is an inevitable and expected broken-by-design outcome of attempting to do so.
> has never, ever worked in the history of humanity.
I think you'll find that the majority of humanity (those who aren't libertarians) actually agree that policing the negative externalities of business should be part of government's function.
Stuff like "we're destroying the ozone layer," "L.A's air is mostly smog," and "this factory keeps tearing children limb from limb" were effectively solved by government policing these negative externalities, not by "the market."
It's a long way from "this factory keeps tearing children limb from limb" to "there are too many car washes in this town."
I specifically said externalities are real problems that bear addressing.
The problem is that once politicians are turned loose, they never stop. They cannot stop. They can't say, "well done, problem solved, let's pack up and go home." That would mean giving up their hard-won power -- and the concominant benefits to themselves and their friends that came with it.
So they must always seek yet another supposed outrage to feed their power. When they can't find one, they manufacture one, to increasingly absurd and implausible lengths, eventually wrecking the system.
But even if I grant you the argument that the same system that bans child labor necessarily leads to the neoliberal brainworms of "let's create a 3% tax credit for businesses that used to be car washes," I'm still very happy we addressed the real problems. And I'd say that government intervention worked, even if some of the laws they pass are stupid or trivial.
> empowering politicians to attempt to override the market and deliberately police the negative outcomes of those externalities in favor of supposed social goods (the determination of which is, in itself, problematic) has never, ever worked in the history of humanity
The ones that don't get torn down and replaced with something else. no big deal so long as you allow people to try things and fail.
The irrational market isn't a problem for politicians it is for investors: people with money, let them learn their lesson. As for the jobs lost, at least the rich investors paid them while the wash was running, they will move on. The jobs are not high skill so no real loss when they are gone.
This ignores the opportunity cost of a more productive business throughout the time period of the low efficiency business: one that may hire more workers and provide more value to potential customers in the locality it serves.
Under this comparison, the foolishness of an investor has resulted in a comparative net loss for themselves and the community.
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 officials and having them implement their will. Trying to call that communism would be... odd.
The way most municipal councillors in English-speaking countries optimize everything to retain homeowner's real estate value while keeping property taxes low doesn't exactly imbue confidence.
Yes, and the entire point of capitalism and why it succeeds so well is that the individual profit motive is enough for investors to, in aggregate, not invest in low efficiency businesses.
As opposed to a central planning model in which a foolish planner can cock up the entire thing because they are usually far less accountable for failure and recieve little reward for success other than continued survival.
I wish people wouldn’t say that any market interference is communism as though the US isnt Keynesian while simultaneously pretending china is even close to communist.
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
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.
Right, I get it, monopolies are bad and this is something I completely agree with. At the same time those well connected elite will commonly band together to create monopolies via predatory pricing, so it turns out that no matter what way you do it you have to have regulatory markets that seek to benefit the consumer.
The elite have all the tools they need already, they always have had that. Representative government is the modern change that keeps them from dominating everything.
Isn't it? Elections are for political institutions, so what you're describing amounts to having political control over land use decisions. OTOH, the market is another, much more direct expression of the intent and values of the local people, so why not just stick with that?
> 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 honest.
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.
Nothing else solves that problem either. Sure you can pass the buck from investors to someone else, but they also don't know what is correct. Everyone is guessing - they often have various evidence but it is never complete enough to be 100% confident in your decisions and so there is always someone guessing.
The difference is here the people making the guess are also taking on the risk of what if they are wrong. When someone else makes the decision they don't have the risk and thus less incentive to get it right. Also that "someone" making the decision tends to be making a lot of decisions and so are unlikely to spend enough time researching it, or alternatively since they don't feel any pain they will spend far too much time on research. (there is no objective way to say what is enough time in research)
The entire point of working for a living instead of e.g. subsistence farming is that you can simply switch jobs if it's not going well.
As an adult if you can't weather a couple of weeks of unemployment you've seriously screwed up somewhere - probably overcommitting to expenses based on assuming that your income is guaranteed.
The mindset that someone should be stopped from even offering a job because it might not be forever is completely ass backwards. It's never forever, act accordingly.
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 family takes time and energy, both scarce when you gotta work two jobs to make ends meet.
Agreed, but tackling the poverty/food access issue is a pareto issue IMHO - get the wide masses out of poverty and provide equal access to healthy food supplies will get rid of a large chunk of the issue.
I agree. Reports from Pew Research Center and CDC show that the cause for obesity is complex and cannot be pinpointed to just poverty. The studies are a decade old, but are still prevalent.
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.
> and lack of anything that resembles a decent food culture.
Yep. I mean, I'm European so I'm a bit biased - here over the pond, we associate American food culture with "tons of fat and sugar".
> 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.
It is, if you have the resources: a car to get to a place where healthy food is sold, most especially, and time and energy to cook.
It simply is not possible to drag oneself out of poverty by the bootstraps. Most of these "live on a frugal budget" peddlers are highly privileged: they can afford to buy in bulk when stuff is on sale, they can afford to store bulk supplies without them going bad, they can afford to drive a lot just to get the best deals. Take these three points out of the equation and most "frugal" influencers get revealed as patronizing scammers who I believe have zero right to exist and bullshit others on the Internet. And the politicians who reference to these bullshit peddlers should be thrown into jail and be served nothing more than dry bread and water for a few weeks, just to get some humility into them.
I'm sick and fucking tired of all of that. Fix poverty instead of patronizing those who are in direst needs.
> They can afford to buy in bulk when stuff is on sale, they can afford to store bulk supplies without them going bad, they can afford to drive a lot just to get the best deals.
In my experience, none of those three are that key at food cost cutting anyway. The key is choosing what to eat. If you make food at home out of cheap, nutritious ingredients, you will do well. The bag of beans that is only 1 lb and is at the expensive convenience store, is a much better deal than the 40 lb Costco crate of frozen pizza or something.
Beans, rice, potatos, eggs, oats. Start with staples like these and it really doesn't matter whether you are getting the name brand or the bulk discount....
> and lack of anything that resembles a decent food culture.
...ah, but here's the problem. If your food culture consists of habits around pizza and burgers, around eating fast food and heating frozen things in microwaves ..... if you never even learned to cook beans, in fact, never learned to even enjoy them and are grossed out by them, if you have no idea how to make a raw potato edible and delicious in 5 minutes.... then... yeah, you won't have any good mental "software" to help you easily feed yourself with stuff like the aforementioned. Instead you'll have to expend valuable time and energy on experimenting and learning new habits and recipes. Until you spend that time you are locked out of the cheaper food and locked into the expensive processed food trap.
> I'm sick and fucking tired of all of that. Fix poverty instead of patronizing those who are in direst needs.
And I'm sick and tired of both sides of this argument. Yes, fix poverty rather than patronizing thoese in need -- but acnowledge the real poverty is primarily cultural, not monetary, and tailor solutions to that, by somehow helping people relearn cultural food skills that were lost during the 20th century industrialization program.
> Beans, rice, potatos, eggs, oats. Start with staples like these and it really doesn't matter whether you are getting the name brand or the bulk discount....
You're still ignoring the point that it can be very hard to even get access to basic staples, and I'm not just talking about the financial aspect but moreso about "how to get to a grocery store", especially in areas with no or derelict public transportation.
> but acnowledge the real poverty is primarily cultural, not monetary
Way over half of Americans can't cover an unexpected $500 emergency bill [1]. America's greatest problem is widespread poverty and income insecurity, everything else stems directly from that.
Not an expert on the financial market, but this article may be worthwhile to consider, 'Actually, Most Americans Can Come Up With $400 in an Emergency' [1]
Eh, this also seems backwards from how most cities actually work...
Most of the time they are looking into bringing businesses in that will have long term staying power, and backing that by offering low interest loans or tax breaks via a number of different programs. No, cities do not want boom/bust type scams that are going to eat up real estate and leave a dilapidated building in the future.
>As an adult if you can't weather a couple of weeks of unemployment you've seriously screwed up somewher
Or rent/housing/food/healthcare has exploded in cost in the past few years and you're like a large percentage of the country living paycheck to paycheck. But hey, screw them anyway, "let them eat cake", what could possibly go wrong.
> As an adult if you can't weather a couple of weeks of unemployment you've seriously screwed up somewhere
Especially considering that back when "we all" farmed, the common amount of savings to have was an entire year's worth, since that's how long it is between harvests (in some climates -- perhaps half a year depending local variation)
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 world get a veto before anyone sets up something as potentially hazardous as a car wash.
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.
This looks like a claim that car owners should be required to have even more insurance, which seems inconsistent with your claim that widespread car ownership is the product of onerous regulation.
All in all I think this is a pretty glib take that I’ve seen enough times that I’m bored with it. Suffice to say that most of the regulations you’re complaining about mostly postdate the widescale adoption of cars. Nobody was instituting parking minimums or insurance mandates ahead of time in order to encourage car ownership; instead, as soon as car companies figured out how to make cars cheaply enough that even their own factory workers could afford them, governments made regulations in response to the overwhelming number of cars that everyone ended up buying.
But that’s a fundamentally different mindset. Back then, living in a democracy where everybody was buying cars meant that the government’s job was to notice that people wanted to drive cars and work to accommodate that. These days, people think the government’s job is to decide for us what we should want and then shape the regulatory environment in such a way as to shape our behavior, because they know better than we do.
>which seems inconsistent with your claim that widespread car ownership is the product of onerous regulation.
how is this inconsistent? Insurance raises have to be approved at the state level, again this is not a free market, and for political reasons many states have kept insurance rates at decades old price levels. Insurers actually lose money in most places because they cannot raise prices. (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...) and as a result often health insurance and other institutions have to cover the cost, which is to say the public pays.
Just to see how absurd this is. Minimum liability in a lot of states is 50k. In Germany and much of Europe minimum liability is seven million.
It's the governments job to take externalities into account and design urban environments rationally, not to coddle car obsessed consumers and have everyone else pay for the cost they impose on others and the environment.
> Just to see how absurd this is. Minimum liability in a lot of states is 50k. In Germany and much of Europe minimum liability is seven million.
Without regulation, minimum liability would be zero.
> It's the governments job to take externalities into account and design urban environments rationally, not to coddle car obsessed consumers
Finally your true colors come out. You believe the government’s job is to decide for us what we should want and then shape the regulatory environment in such a way as to shape our behavior, because they know better than we do. You’re the authoritarian trying to redesign society. Just own up to it and be honest with yourself instead of cynically and disingenuously trying to argue based on principles you don’t even hold.
It sounds like you are saying it would be better for those people to have never been employed (i.e. some of the carwashes never being built) than employed for a while and then losing their job if the carwash goes out of business.
Consider whether the alternative to a car wash being built is leaving the land idle or some higher-value business using it. Part of the problem is that failed businesses often leave a durable footprint - if your car wash fails, in many places it’s just going to sit idle while the land owner tries to find another car wash or someone with enough budget to demolish the old buildings and clean up any dumped chemicals. It probably will happen unless the local economy has completely cratered but it might take a decade and in the meantime it’s just sitting there dragging down the value of adjacent properties.
We have five or six car washes in town (I think...we're pretty spread out, so there might be a few I've never noticed). One is fully automated, no humans touch it. One is low-staff: a couple of guys running wet mops over the exterior before the car goes through. One is pretty full service, with a squad of guys pre-cleaning, minor detailing, hand waxing. The last two (and part of the full-service wash) is four or carport-like stalls with hoses and soap, the driver does all the work.
As the article says, automated or even semi-automated car washes don't provide much employment or sales tax revenue. On sunny days, some of these washes have vehicles sitting in line, waiting their turn...most with their engines idling.
I live in an apartment so managing my own washing is impractical, and is actively discouraged by the landlord. My 15-year-old car goes through the wash three or four times a year, and it's finish is still fine, thanks.
> > 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."
To be fair "market" is referring to two different things in those two sentences. Different markets can have different characteristics.
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.
> 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 other operating expenses. Preemptive regulation is usually unnecessary, and often entails its own deleterious effects.
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 investor revolt [2]; but he has messed up timing for Tesla (peak 400, current 200) and many other stocks causing him to exit those positions before making money.
> 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.
> 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?
Its tangential. The Market-Irrational quote is all about how even if you know the stock market is wrong (especially due to large scale fraud by that company) you may not be able to profit from that knowledge because the market can continue to buy that stock (be irrational) longer than you can afford to have the contrary position (be solvent).
People (probably myself as well) use it to describe other situations though. Such as a Taxi-like company selling 20$ car rides for 10$. No matter how irrational having your only revenue source be a loss-leader for decades; if you bet against Uber at IPO you'd be out 30/share right now (current 70, IPO 40).
To get back to the actual origin of this tangent [1], although Uber still exists but imagine you only had a Taxi industry and Uber comes in and all the Taxi drivers get fired. Then Uber goes bankrupt and all the Uber drivers are fired. Now all you have are a bunch of unemployed people. Society did not benefit here. That's the scenario being described in the origin of our tangent. In these situations there might not be somebody with a large pile of cash that they feel like investing into re-starting the taxi industry so that region may just not have taxis anymore or just the richer parts of the region have a rebirth of the taxi industry and the poorer parts are un/underserved. So it would be rational for people to have a NIMBY approach to something that in the long term will only cause problems.
> I'd regard that rationality itself includes probabilistic decision-making, and that attempting to preempt all risk is itself highly irrational.
Betting with 1:-1 odds is irrational unless you're running a money laundering scheme. If you think that a region can only support 4 car washes then as a local government official you should prevent the 20th from being built because it's just not sustainable (or at least force them to prove 20 can be supported).
Or, more likely, there are legitimate concerns had by part of the town even though another part of the town uses and appreciates them. Both groups can exist at once without astroturfing!
A new car wash recently popped up on the main road near my house, and it has definitely had a substantial negative impact on the traffic patterns surrounding it. Basically every time I go that way I have to maneuver around people clogging up the road waiting to turn into it.
It's not enough to cause me any real pain, but it's definitely enough to make me feel less than kindly towards the proliferation.
The article does mention that, but only in passing! I'm surprised they didn't dig more into it, since the most vocal opponents to more competition would probably be existing businesses!
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 necessary? Who cares?
If there is sufficient demand for car washes that all of them stay in business, then they'll stay, because the local area wants that many car washes. If they aren't binging in money, they'll close. Or just pay out to their employee and landlord indefinitely.
This is why the US has a few trillion in infrastructure debt.
"Oh no, the city had to put in a few million in pipes to supply additional water to an area that had a huge demand spike taking a long term bond on the issue... and now they are all out of business and earning no taxes to pay for the expense. Too bad we didn't actually plan for reasonable growth and resource usage. Hopefully someone can bail us out"
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."
Just because we don't have Georgism doesn't mean we don't already tax land a ton. Annual property tax revenue for the entire US is ~$600 billion. By comparison, federal income tax revenue is about $2.6 trillion annually.
If it’s anything like the 3 that have opened in my town of 80k in literally the last year it’s because they’re huuuuuuge. The wash itself is 100+ft long, and tons of parking, vacuums, etc.
Just one of those things takes up the space of 3 or 4 normal gas stations.
The crazy thing is that after a small wave of initial enthusiasm, they hardly ever even have customers.
Then we get to look at ugly shell of it for years. Commercial real estate is not exactly booming. Most of those places are probably borderline superfund sites with all the chemicals that leach into the soil, anyway.
A bunch of the same business also takes away space from the sorts of businesses that your region probably lacks which would make the town more self-sufficient, interesting, and/or economically productive: a butcher, a jeweler, an audiologist, an independent insurer, a pub, a gardening store, a glassmaker, a theater, a brewer, a computer repair shop, and so on.
My hometown of 40,000 has five; one which replaced the only movie theater in the county (a one-hour radius) that closed at the end of 2020. The local government remarked the car wash will provide jobs. Three employees are needed, according to the "local" news. (Actually, the local newspapers were replaced years ago by a nationwide chain of "independent, regional" news sourcers.)
I'm glad I got away from that place. The most fun you could have on a Friday night was meeting friends at Walmart and then driving to an empty parking lot.
Four or 5 car washes for a city of 17000 people? That’s 1 per 3000 or so people, of which I’m sure only _some_ actually own cars to wash (vs, say, children). Assuming one uses a car wash for 10 minutes maybe once a month, the 5 car wash locations have capacity for something like 144,000 washes a month. Basically 10x the need for a town of that size.
There’s another car wash being built in my neighborhood right now. There are now 5 within a 10-15 minute drive from my house.
A few years ago, mattress stores were popping up all around my neighborhood. Today most of them are gone. These things seem to come in waves and I’ve never understood what drives it.
One reason to limit the number is to prevent them all dying out - I saw a situation near my house years ago where there was a successful laundromat, another opened nearby and both were doing OK but not amazing, and then a third opened up - and all three ended up dying. There was no laundromat for awhile and finally a new fourth one opened up nearby.
One hotel (hub) with differentiated service levels could be more efficient, effective, and ecologically minded. Think Vegas casino property without the casino.
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 like hotels versus transportation versus other people uses of land and resources.
> 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.
Isn't this just true about everything? Having a bunch of shipping companies makes way less sense than having a single globally-integrated logistics solution that everyone uses that could therefore know about and plan around far larger scales.
What I'm trying to say is I don't understand your point.
I'm in south Orange county, California, and... Yeah. Maybe this is car wash mecca? I can think of 6 within a 2 mile radius of my home without even trying. 3 of them are full-service places, too, and they've been there for longer than I've been here (2016, so not that long) and they're always serving cars.
Four or five doesn't sound like much, but the article buries the lede by hiding this fact in a caption: "The omnipresence of the car wash in American life may be underappreciated: There are twice as many car wash outlets as McDonald’s and Starbucks locations combined" and in the article itself "the sector has been expanding at roughly 5% annually, with some forecasts predicting the market to double by 2030. More car washes were built in the last decade than all the preceding years combined."
Seems a bit much?
The concerns over land use and pollution suggest that the car washes are not paying for negative externalities, removing a natural cap on their proliferation. Smells like market failure. Why wait for the businesses to fail?
Walter White is dead. More likely that most people with cars no longer own driveways and car washes have been completely automated, so they’ve become a good, economical choice over the years. It’s a lucrative business now.
Depreciation is available for any company that purchases equipment; the "unique" thing as described in that article is simply that most of the value for car washes is in the equipment, so depreciation strategies are very important, but any business can and should write off equipment, or any other expense against net profits.
> The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 made a significant change in this area, currently allowing businesses to write off 80% of the cost of qualifying property in the year it's placed in service
Why depreciate over 39 years when you can do 80% in one year.
This 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 investment.
Either way, if you're getting 3-5 people washing your car for a tenner, the people you're handing you money to are probably receiving minimal pennies on the dollar.
s/they work hard/somebody decides to tip which may or may not reflect any effort the worker put in because some people just don’t tip and depending on tips is a shitty way to scrape by/
I was referring to the parent comment "The official narrative here is modern slavery with undocumented migrants". Some of the people working in these hand car washes may not have the legal right to work in the UK, which makes them ripe for exploitation.
I volunteer at a refugee charity. In my experience people given the right to stay will take whatever work they can get, which is often crappy work at low wages due to lack of transferable skills and/or English (e.g. security guard).
I think this article is referencing the common trend of drive through automated washes which would make sense if large investors are in the picture. The big automated ones are pushy with their subscriptions which the article also talks about.
These big wash machines are typically staffed by only 2 or 3 people hence the complaints that they don't even create jobs.
That being said, I wish there were more automated washes near me. We find ourselves making excuses to drive by the one we pay a subscription for.
I couldn't imagine ever paying a subscription to a car wash! I barely even pay for Spotify, how often do you go? And how often would you go if you weren't paying a subscription?
Reputable shops I more often see do something more like a 'Prepaid' discount where you get X washes (maybe in the next Y months) for Z dollars, and ideally it's something like you get one wash a month at a 10-20 percent discount.
The profit-gouging ones, either do a 'assume 3-4 washes a month to see real benefit' or assume you are washing once a week in their sub... or do all the other 'tricks' above schemes can allow.
It can make sense if you don't have a garage, and there's a lot of pollen and whatnot where you park. If I don't wash my car ~twice a week, it ends up looking pretty funky.
It's likely just that they haven't done the legwork to properly support it yet, or don't want to be a whitelabel service. Even the little gas station washes by me push subscriptions now. My agency has built out a few of these services in the past and they aren't cheap, even the off-the-shelf ones.
As an aside, the entire experience is awful. "Pay $25/month and get as many $8 washes as you want!" ...but I only get a car wash every 2 months and since you're tracking my license plate, you already know that.
In my specific region of the US, you're more likely to see something between a small 'automated' facility where your car is pulled along a sort of 'assembly line'[0][1] or a somewhat larger 'DIY' car wash where you might have to do your own start stopping or are practically given a squeegee cleaner, some colo(u)red water that may or may not have cleaner, a mounted pedistal shop vac of some sort, and a race against the clock based on how many quarters you put in.
Or, sometimes a combination of the two.
The setups for the DIY shops are usually fairly cheap IMO (Just looking at what's going on at them and the BOM) and the main thing outside of market saturation is having a good ingress/egress setup (If one sucks to get in and out of, folks won't come back.)
That's not to say that there aren't hand car washes as well, however I only tend to see those where I grew up (not too far from here, mind you,) or when it is some sort of school/church/etc fundraiser.
The weird thing you can run into in some cases, even at the automated shops though, is either weird 'implied consent' about extras by folks on one end or another of the line, or in the case of any of them, 'memberships' that are priced to where you'd really be following that 'one wash a week' rule to get your money's worth.
[0] - Often with a warning that they are not responsible for damage to vehicles older than X years and/or with more than Y miles
[1] - These can be surprisingly small, to the point some gas stations have one on the side and a purchase gives a 5/10c discount per gallon. Which, to the general point of 'pennies on the dollar' they made money on long term.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 414 ms ] threadSophisticated machinery, lots of plumbing?
They also have a giant sign in front of the building stating it’s for lease.
Granted, there are benefits to laundering money with literal cash, but you still want some legitimate money trail even if you don't actually hand over the claimed goods or services—enough at least to cover the actual expenses of the business, i'd presume.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBpDvCu8yYI
Also made me think why in the country I live, in stores like 7Eleven you cannot pay with a credit card for gift cards, google pay cards, etc.
Create a very basic "game" that technically meets Valve's requirements. As long as it runs well enough then it won't be blocked. Have people buy Steam gift cards with cash, then buy the games you have published.
Valve takes 30% and you get a nice check with a verified source of funds from a legitimate company.
I guess it's too hard on the storm drains to have soap and dirt and stuff going down them
Or maybe city council is just in some kind of racket with car wash owners or something
But either way, that's why we have so many car washes here... And it sucks ass
In the northern foothills here bordering Phoenix, Arizona, to the north, there are an understandable number of automated carwashes.
However, i've found no manual (pressure wash sort) carwashes, which are easy to find in California and Illinois, for two examples. I don't know why this is.
I can kind of speak for some of L.A.'s use of manual car washes. There's many who live in apartments or places that don't have places to wash at home. Manual car washes fill the void for people that want to clean their own car but don't have space.
https://ncswash.com/what-is-a-car-wash-water-recycling-syste...
The pay/pressure wash systems I've ever seen are all older, I don't know how many new ones they're building. I suspect automatic washers are cheap "enough" now that you can't build a new pay to wash that comes out substantially cheaper.
When I was a kid it was $2 for the power wash for quarters type, and $10 for automatic or by hand, now it's $8 for the automatic decades later.
They can't or won't clean that and it is contaminating in even small amounts. E.g. one drop of oil contaminates 500l of water.
At least for Germany.
Regions where it rains frequently like the PNW have rain gardens, vegetated swales, catch basins/filters, and other mitigation strategies all over the place whereas e.g. California might just have them throughout the drainage system like at the end of the LA river.
Consider this: If I were to say, “In Tokyo, people stand on the left side of the escalator and walk on the right side, opposite to Osaka,” would you automatically assume I'm a Tokyo resident? Probably not, right?
Had the initial commenter simply replaced “In my city […]” with the actual city name, it would likely have been interpreted as general knowledge they picked up along the way. Sure, some might mistakenly assume they hail from or currently reside in said city, but in reality, it’s not a big deal. Take me, for instance—I live in Copenhagen and I’m 100% sure no one will be able to do anything useful with that information.
Providing context is key, especially in online forums like this. Simply stating the city name would have enriched the discussion far more than leaving it ambiguous.
If the commenter says "in [small town in South Carolina] for example", then likelihood for them living there skyrockets.
For something that you can pick up just by visiting? Maybe not. For information like this, about specific bylaws that are relevant for homeowners or car owners? Yeah absolutely I would assume they live there
Some cities have combined or separated sewer systems. Even if combined, it may be designed to overflow during heavy rain, so it's not a guarantee that car wash water with dirt, soap and oil will not go into into a stream somewhere although in that case you're also sending literal shit there. Also when combined, there may still be old infrastructure that drains to a stream or river so a blanket ban is a good idea.
Typically a car wash would be required to have an oil-water separator (with maintenance records and occasional checks) and discharge effluent to the sanitary sewer. Not sure about everywhere but in Vancouver (I have experience working in water treatment there) you also need to have the car wash covered and send collected rainwater to the storm sewer.
Perhaps there could be a middle ground where you're allowed to wash in your driveway but only with a specific soap, and not allowed to degrease your engine bay. There's basically no way to enforce that though,.
Also might as well note here that in Vancouver storm drains that connect to the storm sewer have little fish stenciled by them.
That's fair, but it doesn't explain why the bylaw won't even let you rinse the mud off your car with nothing but water
Places like Vancouver use street cleaning machines in the spring to sweep up any salt on the streets.
I’m skeptical of the ‘big clean’ lobby being able to buy this law, I could be wrong.
First, there's a distinction between sewer vs. stormwater. Sewer lines go to a treatment facility that's built specifically to take all the bad stuff out of the water before flushing that treated water into your local streams. Washing your car into a sewer drain, all good.
Stormwater drains shuttle water directly into your streams.
Stormwater drainage is purpose-built to handle the overflow rain during storms, and only that. In fact, the first goal of stormwater management is to not drain it at all! You want the stormwater to flow through your local ecosystem naturally, generally as groundwater. Nonetheless, storms conspire to drench our non-porous surfaces (asphalt, concrete, etc.) at a rate or duration above the designed for drainage of the system, resulting in overflow. Overflow leads to things like flooding or public safety hazards for cars driving on undrained roads, so a secondary goal of stormwater management becomes shuttling excess water out of the local ecosystem.
What's all this have to do with washing the mud off your car? Well, the first goal of stormwater management is to keep it in your local ecosystem. So, if you can ensure the runoff from washing your car goes into your grass or a specifically designed catch basin, then you're all good. But, if you wash it off into the stormwater drain, well then you're using that drain for a purpose it wasn't built to serve. Your water is neither excess nor should it bypass your local ecosystem. As far-fetched as it may sound, that mud may have local nutrients, pollen, chemicals, etc. that could serve your local ecosystem, and by bypassing that you are disrupting your ecosystem's natural cycles.
A note to the astute reader that says well, we already disrupt our ecosystems with other human activities. Yes, you are correct. That doesn't mean that we can't nor shouldn't take actions to minimize or eliminate further disruptions when they are within our sphere of control. We must strive to find a balance in ecological systems.
I appreciate you taking time to explain all of this, it is pretty baffling otherwise
I wonder how many cities still have a combined system. At least where I live, I could totally see the amount of water coming from the sky regularly beating the amount coming from household drains. Along those lines, our city is spending money replacing private sewer laterals (normally a 10-20K job the homeowner is responsible for) just to cut down on the water intrusion the old laterals (especially party lines) let into the sewer. It's cheaper to pay for the new laterals than it is to build a larger treatment plant.
Shouldn't we ban people showering under the same logic? I use about the same amount of soap to wash my car as I do in the shower, but I shower a lot more often.
My understanding is that the UK has a combined system where rainwater and waste go into the same system and is all treated the same. More because of history than because anyone now thinks that is a good idea. Maybe someone who knows more about this could confirm?
... and the city spends thousands a year on billboards, vinyl printed banners across main roads... "Save water - use a car wash!"
Ugh.
How does this even get enforced? Are the police driving by everyone’s house regularly, looking for those dastardly hoses? Or do they rely on nosey neighbors ratting on each other? I can’t imagine this is the most important crime for the local law enforcement to be investigating.
Enforcement is on a council-by-council basis, but of course in urban areas I imagine this is pretty hard to enforce. In rural settings it must be pretty much impossible. Having said that, I haven't really seen many people at all washing their car at home. Maybe it depends where you live, if you have neighbours who do it a lot it probably feels like everyone does it.
In the last few years, there have been a load of "wash your own car" car wash stations opening up. They're cheap (you can do the car for <100kr - $10 or so), way less than the drive in station, and have things you wouldn't have at home (e.g. cleaning underneath the car, handy for washing off the salt that has come off the road in winter). Not really enforcement but a pretty effective way of nudging people to doing the "right thing".
They also have a hotline for tattletales and HOAs and the police can also report you.
Unfortunately sometimes things don't work like anyone would want them to. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/victims-wonder-why-arpa...
Each car wash is operated by a different entity, offering unique apps and subscription plans.
It's hard to imagine this being profitable given the circumstances. But what do I know, I wash my own car.
I would try it to puzzle it out, but its one of those spinnybrush antenna destroyers and I'm not gonna risk it.
I skimmed the article and don’t see mention of that?
I'm not saying taking an uber everywhere is an alternative to having a car. It's part of the system. There's public transport (tube, DLR, overground, trams, busses), there's rental bikes, rental scooters, there's uber/taxi, there's walking. You use the "car ownership alternative" (or a combination of them) that works for each given situation.
You aren’t commuting daily in an Uber, nor driving kids to school and activities with all their gear and car seats. Those are the activities which might have moved the needle on needing Uber level frequency of car washes (but even then, I assume an Uber is washed every other day or so, or perhaps I just have a cynical view of humanity keeping the inside of taxis clean).
True, I believe that’s the reason too, a while ago I used to park in an underground parking with a free washing area, the car next to me used to be clean all the time and the guy washes it every day, one time I asked him about such dedication, he said simply he is an uber driver!
It is not in West/Fargo. There is almost no rideshare capacity (there are a couple people) and the taxis use their own wash. Even Google does not capture the new 12 washes that have appeared in the last 18 months. Some of them can't staff and are closed much of the time. Especially during winter, when you want washes, it seems like land improvement. Add sewer, power, water, network to undeveloped land as a "business". Hold for a decade. Profit.
The last cab company I worked for had a car wash in the yard that usually managed to make the car dirtier than it was before it was washed. But that was their 'standard', it was free and I really didn't care so...
Isn't this an indicator that economy is fine, people are fine, since they can spend this type of money on car washes? How can something this worthless be booming, if people are struggling.
At 1 car every 14 minutes on average, a single bay will easily clear $1,000/day of revenue.
However my neighbor used to own a chain of car washes in the suburbs and going by his 11,000 sq-ft house, I'm guessing it was pretty profitable!
I've seen other sites state up to 120 cars per hour. Assuming 750/day @ $20 wash, that's an annual gross of about $5.5M. I doubt they're running at that rate consistently, just at peak. But I would be surprised if $2M wasn't the average in town. That's pretty good for a low labor enterprise.
https://www.broadwayequipment.com/conveyor-car-wash/
They are popping up because it is good, mostly passive income if you are in the right area.
(Edit: maybe "sure sign" is a little bit hasty, but I think the other possible reasons for a "credit card only" sign are actually worse morally than money laundering)
Maybe some tax avoidance scheme, not money laundering.
Unless you advertise as credit card to outsiders but take cash as part of some scheme
There are private equity funds that might aquire 50 of these businesses at 2-5M each, roll them into an index, and sell the index. Same with doctors/dentist practices.
The financing of these businesses is so opaque.
Is it really entrepreneurship though? Seems like "Buy, squeeze, rinse, and repeat" - which is killing businesses rather than creating them.
VCs certainly see it this way, and so do the pedigreed people they fund. The only people thinking its different, are the ones on the outside looking in.
The first Flagship car wash arrived 10 years ago, and they are always busy.
Still, how many can a town support?
[1] https://tommycarwash.com/
Why are there so many cars?
Because our country is ultimately designed and developed by urban sprawl madmen with a highway fetish and zero vision for a better way for humans to live and operate.
I love how we hyper fixate on stupid questions about car washes while pretending like car dependency isn't the problem.
Not to cause us to need more car washes. But it was by design.
They seem like just about one of the easiest businesses to run. Minimal employees, low variable costs, likely a reasonable long term investment in the actual rental estate.
In many ways, this the same as gas stations, convenience stores, and CVS/rite-aid/walgreens. People don’t want to go out if their way.
I suspect some of this all is them being "sold" and in a few years a bunch will be gone, unable to make the payments on the loans taken.
We're seeing more car washes opening up around here, but I think that is just as much about having the area under services for ages. Now I don't have to wait in line for 45 minutes, or risk a fine for cleaning my car in the drive way (which I don't think you should be doing anyway).
2) If the problem is that subscription users aren’t paying local sales taxes, why not charge property taxes? (or, Land Value Tax!)
I've spent $200 - $350 on car detailing as a service several times now. They drive to your home and work on your car for several hours to get it looking brand new.
As someone who drives an SUV, has dogs in the car frequently, and gets my vehicle muddy on the inside, this is a fantastic service.
A bunch of my neighbors use the exact same service.
Read reviews. Ask around at nearby dealerships if they use one.
Not me because I don't care about my car enough, but that doesn't seem like a particularly outrageous number to me.
There was hardly a time there wasn't a short line to go through and many had the subscriptions, you can tell because the attendant just guides you into the track and there was an RFID tag on your windshield and if the attendant didn't have to take payment you knew they had the subscription.
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 juristidiction? Assuming all other laws and ordinances are being complied with, and that there is no actual "nuisance", why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide?
Last night I stayed at a hotel very close to London Heathrow Airport. There, on the Bath Road, there are (literally) dozens of hotels, one right next to another. This is a feature not a bug! Apparently, there is lots of demand for hotels at that location, which isn't exactly a surprise. If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right?
https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc...
Admittedly, the local bus services around the airport which used to be free of charge (prior to 2021) are now chargable, but at less than £2 per trip the services are hardly expensive and are fairly fast and very frequent ... unlike the Hotel Hoppa services which seem primarily designed to rip off unsuspecting visitors.
On the contrary, the ever increasing dysfunction in US politics is largely because the players have hacked their way past the constraints of this model.
Even if it were true, I'm not sure that that shows there are too many car washes, just that consumer behavior surrounding car washes has changed dramatically in recent years.
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 about the ones that don't and the people who subsequently lose their jobs.
It's a fair question to ask if you're building too many of a certain service, especially when the ones that fail leave behind abandoned husks and unemployed people. Ya know, the people that the local politician is supposed to help. Local leaders should be at least thinking about these questions.
There's a lot going on in your statement to dig through.
The article specifically says these car washes barely add jobs.. but let's ignore that.
When a business opens and starts to hire people, there is no guarantee it will exist long term. When a person applies for a job, they need to do some due diligence researching the business to see if it sounds like something that will be around as long as they want to have a job.
Are you proposing we shouldn't allow "risky" business to start and hire people because there is no certainty they will be around in 1-5 years? Of course that doesn't make any sense.
If a business fails, people will lose their jobs, but that is not a reason to prevent business from starting. In fact, if we did prevent them, those jobs would have never existed!
This is a nitpick as I agree with the rest of your comment, but most people are absolutely not qualified to make that assessment. (In fact, it's debatable whether anyone can make that claim with any amount of certainty. Even the most successful investors are often wrong.)
People are pretty smart.
> 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.
In practice, the politicians supposed to be looking out for the externality damage instead merely redirect outcomes to benefit themselves and their friends. The result is invariably worse than whatever damage is wrought by the open and free market.
This is not a failure or shortcoming of any one particular attempt to corral the market towards social good; it is an inevitable and expected broken-by-design outcome of attempting to do so.
I think you'll find that the majority of humanity (those who aren't libertarians) actually agree that policing the negative externalities of business should be part of government's function.
Stuff like "we're destroying the ozone layer," "L.A's air is mostly smog," and "this factory keeps tearing children limb from limb" were effectively solved by government policing these negative externalities, not by "the market."
I specifically said externalities are real problems that bear addressing.
The problem is that once politicians are turned loose, they never stop. They cannot stop. They can't say, "well done, problem solved, let's pack up and go home." That would mean giving up their hard-won power -- and the concominant benefits to themselves and their friends that came with it.
So they must always seek yet another supposed outrage to feed their power. When they can't find one, they manufacture one, to increasingly absurd and implausible lengths, eventually wrecking the system.
But even if I grant you the argument that the same system that bans child labor necessarily leads to the neoliberal brainworms of "let's create a 3% tax credit for businesses that used to be car washes," I'm still very happy we addressed the real problems. And I'd say that government intervention worked, even if some of the laws they pass are stupid or trivial.
Child labor laws? Pollution laws? Seat belt laws? Labor safety laws? Drug-safety laws?
The irrational market isn't a problem for politicians it is for investors: people with money, let them learn their lesson. As for the jobs lost, at least the rich investors paid them while the wash was running, they will move on. The jobs are not high skill so no real loss when they are gone.
Under this comparison, the foolishness of an investor has resulted in a comparative net loss for themselves and the community.
USSR tries to optimize business from top but selecting what would be produced and how much. Didn’t work well for community or customers.
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 officials and having them implement their will. Trying to call that communism would be... odd.
As opposed to a central planning model in which a foolish planner can cock up the entire thing because they are usually far less accountable for failure and recieve little reward for success other than continued survival.
"Local people electing a local government choosing what gets built locally is communism"
And for whatever it’s worth there aren’t nearly enough car washes where I live.
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.
The elite have all the tools they need already, they always have had that. Representative government is the modern change that keeps them from dominating everything.
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 honest.
The difference is here the people making the guess are also taking on the risk of what if they are wrong. When someone else makes the decision they don't have the risk and thus less incentive to get it right. Also that "someone" making the decision tends to be making a lot of decisions and so are unlikely to spend enough time researching it, or alternatively since they don't feel any pain they will spend far too much time on research. (there is no objective way to say what is enough time in research)
As an adult if you can't weather a couple of weeks of unemployment you've seriously screwed up somewhere - probably overcommitting to expenses based on assuming that your income is guaranteed.
The mindset that someone should be stopped from even offering a job because it might not be forever is completely ass backwards. It's never forever, act accordingly.
Only 64% of Americans could cover an expected bill of $400.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2021-economic-we...
There are a _lot_ of really short sighted people out there.
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 family takes time and energy, both scarce when you gotta work two jobs to make ends meet.
[1] https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/11/13/obesity-a...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6650a1.htm
That's literally the first point I listed.
> and lack of anything that resembles a decent food culture.
Yep. I mean, I'm European so I'm a bit biased - here over the pond, we associate American food culture with "tons of fat and sugar".
> 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.
It is, if you have the resources: a car to get to a place where healthy food is sold, most especially, and time and energy to cook.
It simply is not possible to drag oneself out of poverty by the bootstraps. Most of these "live on a frugal budget" peddlers are highly privileged: they can afford to buy in bulk when stuff is on sale, they can afford to store bulk supplies without them going bad, they can afford to drive a lot just to get the best deals. Take these three points out of the equation and most "frugal" influencers get revealed as patronizing scammers who I believe have zero right to exist and bullshit others on the Internet. And the politicians who reference to these bullshit peddlers should be thrown into jail and be served nothing more than dry bread and water for a few weeks, just to get some humility into them.
I'm sick and fucking tired of all of that. Fix poverty instead of patronizing those who are in direst needs.
In my experience, none of those three are that key at food cost cutting anyway. The key is choosing what to eat. If you make food at home out of cheap, nutritious ingredients, you will do well. The bag of beans that is only 1 lb and is at the expensive convenience store, is a much better deal than the 40 lb Costco crate of frozen pizza or something.
Beans, rice, potatos, eggs, oats. Start with staples like these and it really doesn't matter whether you are getting the name brand or the bulk discount....
> and lack of anything that resembles a decent food culture.
...ah, but here's the problem. If your food culture consists of habits around pizza and burgers, around eating fast food and heating frozen things in microwaves ..... if you never even learned to cook beans, in fact, never learned to even enjoy them and are grossed out by them, if you have no idea how to make a raw potato edible and delicious in 5 minutes.... then... yeah, you won't have any good mental "software" to help you easily feed yourself with stuff like the aforementioned. Instead you'll have to expend valuable time and energy on experimenting and learning new habits and recipes. Until you spend that time you are locked out of the cheaper food and locked into the expensive processed food trap.
> I'm sick and fucking tired of all of that. Fix poverty instead of patronizing those who are in direst needs.
And I'm sick and tired of both sides of this argument. Yes, fix poverty rather than patronizing thoese in need -- but acnowledge the real poverty is primarily cultural, not monetary, and tailor solutions to that, by somehow helping people relearn cultural food skills that were lost during the 20th century industrialization program.
You're still ignoring the point that it can be very hard to even get access to basic staples, and I'm not just talking about the financial aspect but moreso about "how to get to a grocery store", especially in areas with no or derelict public transportation.
> but acnowledge the real poverty is primarily cultural, not monetary
Way over half of Americans can't cover an unexpected $500 emergency bill [1]. America's greatest problem is widespread poverty and income insecurity, everything else stems directly from that.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/31/63percent-of-workers-are-una...
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.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-08-03/actual...
Most of the time they are looking into bringing businesses in that will have long term staying power, and backing that by offering low interest loans or tax breaks via a number of different programs. No, cities do not want boom/bust type scams that are going to eat up real estate and leave a dilapidated building in the future.
>As an adult if you can't weather a couple of weeks of unemployment you've seriously screwed up somewher
Or rent/housing/food/healthcare has exploded in cost in the past few years and you're like a large percentage of the country living paycheck to paycheck. But hey, screw them anyway, "let them eat cake", what could possibly go wrong.
Especially considering that back when "we all" farmed, the common amount of savings to have was an entire year's worth, since that's how long it is between harvests (in some climates -- perhaps half a year depending local variation)
We don't generally say that about small businesses that need cash flow
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.
This looks like a claim that car owners should be required to have even more insurance, which seems inconsistent with your claim that widespread car ownership is the product of onerous regulation.
All in all I think this is a pretty glib take that I’ve seen enough times that I’m bored with it. Suffice to say that most of the regulations you’re complaining about mostly postdate the widescale adoption of cars. Nobody was instituting parking minimums or insurance mandates ahead of time in order to encourage car ownership; instead, as soon as car companies figured out how to make cars cheaply enough that even their own factory workers could afford them, governments made regulations in response to the overwhelming number of cars that everyone ended up buying.
But that’s a fundamentally different mindset. Back then, living in a democracy where everybody was buying cars meant that the government’s job was to notice that people wanted to drive cars and work to accommodate that. These days, people think the government’s job is to decide for us what we should want and then shape the regulatory environment in such a way as to shape our behavior, because they know better than we do.
how is this inconsistent? Insurance raises have to be approved at the state level, again this is not a free market, and for political reasons many states have kept insurance rates at decades old price levels. Insurers actually lose money in most places because they cannot raise prices. (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...) and as a result often health insurance and other institutions have to cover the cost, which is to say the public pays.
Just to see how absurd this is. Minimum liability in a lot of states is 50k. In Germany and much of Europe minimum liability is seven million.
It's the governments job to take externalities into account and design urban environments rationally, not to coddle car obsessed consumers and have everyone else pay for the cost they impose on others and the environment.
Without regulation, minimum liability would be zero.
> It's the governments job to take externalities into account and design urban environments rationally, not to coddle car obsessed consumers
Finally your true colors come out. You believe the government’s job is to decide for us what we should want and then shape the regulatory environment in such a way as to shape our behavior, because they know better than we do. You’re the authoritarian trying to redesign society. Just own up to it and be honest with yourself instead of cynically and disingenuously trying to argue based on principles you don’t even hold.
As the article says, automated or even semi-automated car washes don't provide much employment or sales tax revenue. On sunny days, some of these washes have vehicles sitting in line, waiting their turn...most with their engines idling.
I live in an apartment so managing my own washing is impractical, and is actively discouraged by the landlord. My 15-year-old car goes through the wash three or four times a year, and it's finish is still fine, thanks.
To be fair "market" is referring to two different things in those two sentences. Different markets can have different characteristics.
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 other operating expenses. Preemptive regulation is usually unnecessary, and often entails its own deleterious effects.
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 investor revolt [2]; but he has messed up timing for Tesla (peak 400, current 200) and many other stocks causing him to exit those positions before making money.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-pro...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry#Investment_caree...
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.
Its tangential. The Market-Irrational quote is all about how even if you know the stock market is wrong (especially due to large scale fraud by that company) you may not be able to profit from that knowledge because the market can continue to buy that stock (be irrational) longer than you can afford to have the contrary position (be solvent).
People (probably myself as well) use it to describe other situations though. Such as a Taxi-like company selling 20$ car rides for 10$. No matter how irrational having your only revenue source be a loss-leader for decades; if you bet against Uber at IPO you'd be out 30/share right now (current 70, IPO 40).
To get back to the actual origin of this tangent [1], although Uber still exists but imagine you only had a Taxi industry and Uber comes in and all the Taxi drivers get fired. Then Uber goes bankrupt and all the Uber drivers are fired. Now all you have are a bunch of unemployed people. Society did not benefit here. That's the scenario being described in the origin of our tangent. In these situations there might not be somebody with a large pile of cash that they feel like investing into re-starting the taxi industry so that region may just not have taxis anymore or just the richer parts of the region have a rebirth of the taxi industry and the poorer parts are un/underserved. So it would be rational for people to have a NIMBY approach to something that in the long term will only cause problems.
> I'd regard that rationality itself includes probabilistic decision-making, and that attempting to preempt all risk is itself highly irrational.
Betting with 1:-1 odds is irrational unless you're running a money laundering scheme. If you think that a region can only support 4 car washes then as a local government official you should prevent the 20th from being built because it's just not sustainable (or at least force them to prove 20 can be supported).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39738996
A new car wash recently popped up on the main road near my house, and it has definitely had a substantial negative impact on the traffic patterns surrounding it. Basically every time I go that way I have to maneuver around people clogging up the road waiting to turn into it.
It's not enough to cause me any real pain, but it's definitely enough to make me feel less than kindly towards the proliferation.
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.
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 necessary? Who cares?
If there is sufficient demand for car washes that all of them stay in business, then they'll stay, because the local area wants that many car washes. If they aren't binging in money, they'll close. Or just pay out to their employee and landlord indefinitely.
"Oh no, the city had to put in a few million in pipes to supply additional water to an area that had a huge demand spike taking a long term bond on the issue... and now they are all out of business and earning no taxes to pay for the expense. Too bad we didn't actually plan for reasonable growth and resource usage. Hopefully someone can bail us out"
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."
If we taxed land, then sure, we'd get efficient use of land. But we (mostly) don't, so here we are, surrounded by car washes and parking lots.
Just because we don't have Georgism doesn't mean we don't already tax land a ton. Annual property tax revenue for the entire US is ~$600 billion. By comparison, federal income tax revenue is about $2.6 trillion annually.
Just one of those things takes up the space of 3 or 4 normal gas stations.
The crazy thing is that after a small wave of initial enthusiasm, they hardly ever even have customers.
My hometown of 40,000 has five; one which replaced the only movie theater in the county (a one-hour radius) that closed at the end of 2020. The local government remarked the car wash will provide jobs. Three employees are needed, according to the "local" news. (Actually, the local newspapers were replaced years ago by a nationwide chain of "independent, regional" news sourcers.)
I'm glad I got away from that place. The most fun you could have on a Friday night was meeting friends at Walmart and then driving to an empty parking lot.
It’s not like Adam Smith’s invisible finger didn’t touch the cupcake bakery mania, froyo, etc.
A few years ago, mattress stores were popping up all around my neighborhood. Today most of them are gone. These things seem to come in waves and I’ve never understood what drives it.
One reason to limit the number is to prevent them all dying out - I saw a situation near my house years ago where there was a successful laundromat, another opened nearby and both were doing OK but not amazing, and then a third opened up - and all three ended up dying. There was no laundromat for awhile and finally a new fourth one opened up nearby.
One hotel (hub) with differentiated service levels could be more efficient, effective, and ecologically minded. Think Vegas casino property without the casino.
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.
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 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.
What I'm trying to say is I don't understand your point.
Seems a bit much?
The concerns over land use and pollution suggest that the car washes are not paying for negative externalities, removing a natural cap on their proliferation. Smells like market failure. Why wait for the businesses to fail?
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/car-washes/
https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cos...
There is an accelerated depreciate for car washes that runs out in 2026 I think.
https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cos...
> The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 made a significant change in this area, currently allowing businesses to write off 80% of the cost of qualifying property in the year it's placed in service
Why depreciate over 39 years when you can do 80% in one year.
And there's nothing in there to do with car washes specifically, though? Just general MACRS etc?
The tax act of 2017 has special provisions where almost nothing but car washes qualify.
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 investment.
Either way, if you're getting 3-5 people washing your car for a tenner, the people you're handing you money to are probably receiving minimal pennies on the dollar.
>They're legit
It is hard to know whethr they are working legally.
No?
These big wash machines are typically staffed by only 2 or 3 people hence the complaints that they don't even create jobs.
That being said, I wish there were more automated washes near me. We find ourselves making excuses to drive by the one we pay a subscription for.
Reputable shops I more often see do something more like a 'Prepaid' discount where you get X washes (maybe in the next Y months) for Z dollars, and ideally it's something like you get one wash a month at a 10-20 percent discount.
The profit-gouging ones, either do a 'assume 3-4 washes a month to see real benefit' or assume you are washing once a week in their sub... or do all the other 'tricks' above schemes can allow.
But I never see anyone using the subscription car wash in town, so who knows? The new ones connected to the gas station see some action.
As an aside, the entire experience is awful. "Pay $25/month and get as many $8 washes as you want!" ...but I only get a car wash every 2 months and since you're tracking my license plate, you already know that.
Or, sometimes a combination of the two.
The setups for the DIY shops are usually fairly cheap IMO (Just looking at what's going on at them and the BOM) and the main thing outside of market saturation is having a good ingress/egress setup (If one sucks to get in and out of, folks won't come back.)
That's not to say that there aren't hand car washes as well, however I only tend to see those where I grew up (not too far from here, mind you,) or when it is some sort of school/church/etc fundraiser.
The weird thing you can run into in some cases, even at the automated shops though, is either weird 'implied consent' about extras by folks on one end or another of the line, or in the case of any of them, 'memberships' that are priced to where you'd really be following that 'one wash a week' rule to get your money's worth.
[0] - Often with a warning that they are not responsible for damage to vehicles older than X years and/or with more than Y miles
[1] - These can be surprisingly small, to the point some gas stations have one on the side and a purchase gives a 5/10c discount per gallon. Which, to the general point of 'pennies on the dollar' they made money on long term.
Most casual work was done by teens and middle aged women through history but now it's mostly foreigners.
Anything done by citizens attracts huge markups.