[HN Gopher] Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
___________________________________________________________________
Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
Author : philip1209
Score : 205 points
Date : 2024-03-17 15:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| diogenescynic wrote:
| 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.
| malfist wrote:
| Just like storage units?
| diogenescynic wrote:
| 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...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Could that land have toxic soil, and therefore not be zoned
| for anything else?
| Solvency wrote:
| When in doubted the answer is always "because something
| is utterly fucked in that zone" and done by humans.
| renewiltord wrote:
| In SF, the answer is always "because the neighbours
| complained".
| dleink wrote:
| Are the rates comparatively expensive?
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I wouldn't think they would be especially cheap to build
| though?
|
| Sophisticated machinery, lots of plumbing?
| diogenescynic wrote:
| 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.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| 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.
| HillRat wrote:
| 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.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| 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.
| arbitrage wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Here are some prices, but they vary a lot:
| https://www.carwashconsignment.com/equipment/automatics
| dboreham wrote:
| The machinery can be moved to another site.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Probably easy to manage 10 of them too. Not much training to
| do, only stock a few products, only a few important KPIs.
| bombcar wrote:
| The most famous of those is parking lots. I'm not sure car
| washes are the same, because a car wash is way more expensive
| than paving a lot.
| polonbike wrote:
| Did the serie Breaking Bad inspire a trend, showing a seemingly
| innocent/efficient way to clean money ?
| diggan wrote:
| Unlikely, the meme of using car washing places for washing
| money has been around for longer than the tv show.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| The show was written in eary 2000s - I seriously doubt many
| people pay cash anymore
| jjulius wrote:
| Late 2000s and early 2010s*.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Er you're right it was during gfc when vince gilligan lost
| his job. The point still stands though
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But people don't have to pay cash, the "pretend people" pay
| cash.
| pxeboot wrote:
| I won't claim this isn't happening somewhere, but the newer
| automated car washes near me are card only. They don't
| accept cash at all.
| pillusmany wrote:
| If you pay with card there will be an electronic trace.
| darby_eight wrote:
| 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.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| If you do too many cash transactions compared to legit
| carwashes in the area i can imagine it will attract
| attention
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| So buy all the other carwashes in the area, offer them
| some money in a nice way, or if this doesn't work, guess
| you just have to do it the hard way.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| 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
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| You would need to get all of the cash offshore then
| first, right.
| phillc73 wrote:
| 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.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| John Mulaney | Venmo Is For Drug Deals[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBpDvCu8yYI
| andix wrote:
| I don't think a car wash is a very good place to wash money,
| but it's a great joke for a tv show.
| tekla wrote:
| Wow. The Term has been in use since the early 1900's
| Telemakhos wrote:
| 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.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| 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.
| notdang wrote:
| So how do you clean them with this scheme? By registering a
| game on Steam or selling something on Amazon?
|
| 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.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| In my city you're not allowed to wash your car in your driveway
|
| 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
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| This is interesting, what you mention.
|
| 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.
| ohmyiv wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The automatic systems _can_ reuse water, and quite a bit:
|
| 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.
| anotheruser13 wrote:
| 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.
| notanormalnerd wrote:
| It is mostl due to the oil and other hazardous materials
| potentially going into the ground or the city sewer.
|
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| Doesn't any oil on the road etc end up in the sewers next
| time it rains _anyway_?
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > 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
| josho wrote:
| My understanding is that it's not just about the soap. But
| also to restrict the amount of oil, gas and salt getting
| washed down the storm drains.
|
| 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.
| Denzel wrote:
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Thank you for this very detailed write up, this actually
| clears up a lot.
|
| I appreciate you taking time to explain all of this, it
| is pretty baffling otherwise
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It's usually not just mud on your car and all the other
| stuff is also not good to let into the water untreated
| either
| johnwalkr wrote:
| And you can't feasibly regulate individuals to only put
| "mud" into the sewer system, but you can regulate and
| inspect a car wash.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >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.
| milanhbs wrote:
| Your driveway drains to a nearby body of water, most
| likely, while your bathroom trains into sewage which is
| treated.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 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!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 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?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| In my city, the mayor and his family own the largest chain of
| carwashes in the county and surrounds...
|
| ... and the city spends thousands a year on billboards, vinyl
| printed banners across main roads... "Save water - use a car
| wash!"
|
| Ugh.
| randerson wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 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.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| 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".
| asciimov wrote:
| 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.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Seriously. I could just hose down my car while I'm hosing off
| the driveway and no one would be the wiser
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > I can't imagine this is the most important crime for the
| local law enforcement to be investigating.
|
| Unfortunately sometimes things don't work like _anyone_ would
| want them to. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/victims-
| wonder-why-arpa...
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Commercial car washes recycle their water.
| bombcar wrote:
| Substantially - we're talking 300 liters per vehicle down
| to 30.
| nunez wrote:
| 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.
| babas wrote:
| 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| Everyone wants to be a remote entrepreneur passive income
| digital nomad.
| myself248 wrote:
| ...did you say 'apps'?
| compootr wrote:
| I hate the trend that everything must be an app
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| nytesky wrote:
| 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?
| elwell wrote:
| But if I can avoid buying a car because Uber, then number of
| washes goes down or is at least balanced.
| williamdclt wrote:
| In London at least, Uber is an alternative to public
| transport (and taxis obv), not to car ownership
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Both public transport and taxi/cab/uber are alternatives to
| car ownership.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| You're not wrong but my point stands.
|
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| usrusr wrote:
| 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)
| mr_toad wrote:
| Maybe that's the real reason there are lots of new car
| washes?
| closewith wrote:
| That seems unlikely, given professional rideshare drivers
| will have to wash their cars probably two orders of magnitude
| more than the average driver.
| nytesky wrote:
| 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).
| tamimio wrote:
| > 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!
| Supermancho wrote:
| >> 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.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > and the taxis use their own wash.
|
| 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...
| Supermancho wrote:
| 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.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| When I worked at a carwash half the cars came from the local
| car dealerships.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| 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.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I wonder which is more wasteful: parking decks for
| dealerships or washing hundreds of cars every month.
| bsdpufferfish wrote:
| sales costs money
| bombcar wrote:
| parking decks don't save you from needing washes
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| 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.
| lowkj wrote:
| But if you value your time, why would you wash your car
| multiple times per month?
| phillc73 wrote:
| That's perfect. I do not wash my car, because I value my
| time. I thought I was just lazy!
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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...
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| greedo wrote:
| 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.
| waveBidder wrote:
| 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.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| In the time it takes to drive to one, wait and drive back,
| you've already spent the same time as washing yourself at
| home.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| greedo wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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!
| beede wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'm guessing OP was referring to the average over
| multiple stalls.
| greedo wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.broadwayequipment.com/conveyor-car-wash/
| socar wrote:
| Money Laundering, rings a bell ?
| diogenescynic wrote:
| I thought that was what all the mattress stores were for.
| xenospn wrote:
| Mattress stores and Psychics. Seriously, there's thousands of
| both all across the United States - and I've never seen
| anyone set foot in either.
| popcalc wrote:
| 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.
| AmVess wrote:
| Hard to do since most of these are credit card only now.
|
| They are popping up because it is good, mostly passive income
| if you are in the right area.
| nix0n wrote:
| "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)
| j16sdiz wrote:
| "Credit card only" meant everything have paper trail.
|
| Maybe some tax avoidance scheme, not money laundering.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| 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.
|
| The financing of these businesses is so opaque.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Yeah, "Entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA)", is
| something I've seen a lot of MBAs study and prioritize.
|
| Is it really entrepreneurship though? Seems like "Buy, squeeze,
| rinse, and repeat" - which is killing businesses rather than
| creating them.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| 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.
| jnwatson wrote:
| In Houston and Dallas 30 years ago these were common. When I
| moved to the East coast 20 years ago I was surprised it wasn't a
| thing here.
|
| The first Flagship car wash arrived 10 years ago, and they are
| always busy.
|
| Still, how many can a town support?
| jameskilton wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://tommycarwash.com/
| Solvency wrote:
| Why so many car washes?
|
| 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.
| elwell wrote:
| Do you think it's that orchestrated? I think it's more:
| evolution / chaos / emergent behavior.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| MBCook wrote:
| 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.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Huh, this whole time I thought they were just a way to launder
| money from selling meth
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| more importantly, after the switch to EVs, you're still gonna
| need car washes. Gas stations, not so much.
| bombcar wrote:
| My guess is the gas stations will have car washes attached to
| them (as some already do).
|
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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).
| samsk wrote:
| Ouch, just remembered I've missed my regular yearly car wash.
| Don't tell I should do such a unnecessary and time consuming
| thing more often.
| elwell wrote:
| Because every year we're more so too lazy/busy for physical work.
| Not judging that, just observing.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Umqn3
| bee_rider wrote:
| 1) Who is spending $20 a month on car washes?
|
| 2) If the problem is that subscription users aren't paying local
| sales taxes, why not charge property taxes? (or, Land Value Tax!)
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| Car dealerships are a big source
| massysett wrote:
| Don't car dealers often have an automatic wash on site?
| Unless these are little used-car lots?
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| Depends on the dealer. But definitely not all.
| bluGill wrote:
| Some do, most do not. I used to make test equipment and so
| was at many of the dealers within 100 miles to test
| something so I saw a lot of dealers.
| bombcar wrote:
| One car wash per dealer would be even more dense than the
| current number of car washes. Dealers seem to be
| _everywhere_.
| krupan wrote:
| In winter where I live there's a ton of salt on the roads and
| you don't want to leave that stuff caked on your car
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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.
| nunez wrote:
| this will ruin your paint over time
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > 1) Who is spending $20 a month on car washes?
|
| 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.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| This a national company? I'd love to find someone around me
| that does this.
| bombcar wrote:
| Search "mobile detailing" - it's a common form of
| franchise, as it's relatively cheap on the equipment.
|
| Read reviews. Ask around at nearby dealerships if they use
| one.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| >1) Who is spending $20 a month on car washes?
|
| Not me because I don't care about my car enough, but that
| doesn't seem like a particularly outrageous number to me.
| j-bos wrote:
| Sadly, I am. The air is dirty, the car gets filthy, and it's
| against the lease and mighty inconvenient to wash in an
| apartment complex.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| $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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| $30/month to wait in a line. Fun times we live in.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| 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.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Surely Disneyland is more fun than a car wash
| bombcar wrote:
| If you take the kids to the car wash when they're small
| enough, you can tell them it's Disneyland.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| You end up spending that much if you live in a winter climate.
| Salt is really bad for cars, so you end up washing a time or
| two a month generally.
| doubloon wrote:
| 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 ,
| logifail wrote:
| > 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?
| dboreham wrote:
| The lack of shuttles from those hotels to the terminal seems
| like a bug though.
| logifail wrote:
| > The lack of shuttles from those hotels to the terminal
|
| 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 PS2 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.
| hobobaggins wrote:
| 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!)
| beejiu wrote:
| Yep, businesses naturally cluster like this. It's called
| Hotelling's Law: https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/
| boringg wrote:
| You should see how Hanoi businesses used to cluster
| bandyaboot wrote:
| > 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.
| megablast wrote:
| Four, when there used to be none 10 years ago.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| atrus wrote:
| > 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.
| grecy wrote:
| > _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!
| RussianCow wrote:
| > 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.)
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
|
| People are pretty smart.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| For a minimum wage job at a car wash? Seriously?
| Absolutely not.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
| RussianCow wrote:
| 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.
| pjlegato wrote:
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| > 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."
| pjlegato wrote:
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| They're different in magnitude, sure.
|
| 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.
| D-Coder wrote:
| > 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
|
| Child labor laws? Pollution laws? Seat belt laws? Labor
| safety laws? Drug-safety laws?
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| 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.
| para_parolu wrote:
| Who defines more productive business? Maybe car wash is a
| good business for people to work for in some period of
| live.
|
| USSR tries to optimize business from top but selecting
| what would be produced and how much. Didn't work well for
| community or customers.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| I-M-S wrote:
| 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.
| gameman144 wrote:
| Are boom/bust cycles unique to capitalism? China is going
| through a pretty big bust and is hardly a capitalist role
| model.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Is China not a capitalist country? It does not appear to
| be a heavily planned economy, at least not in the past
| few decades.
| oreally wrote:
| Yes it is ever since it opened up, granting some
| exceptions to inwardness, recent bits of geopolitics and
| socialist moves.
| int_19h wrote:
| Having lived in the USSR, I certainly prefer late stage
| capitalism.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| 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.
| henriquez wrote:
| So you're advocating a Chinese Communist Party model or
| what? A central authority determines what the market
| should be vs. what the market _is?_
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It's kind of funny listening to the silly things free
| market maximalists tend to say....
|
| "Local people electing a local government choosing what
| gets built locally is communism"
| henriquez wrote:
| 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.
| muti wrote:
| 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
| Newlaptop wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| Gormo wrote:
| 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?
| gitonup wrote:
| > 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > As an adult if you can't weather a couple of weeks of
| unemployment you've seriously screwed up somewhere
|
| Only 64% of Americans could cover an expected bill of $400.
|
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2021-economic-
| we...
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Indeed. More than 36% of Americans are clinically obese.
|
| There are a _lot_ of really short sighted people out
| there.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-
| deserts
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Many people are obese despite not living in poverty
| (including myself, unfortunately).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| boohoowangle wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2013/11/13/obesity-a...
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6650a1.htm
| suslik wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > an overabundance of sugar in the diet
|
| 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.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| You will not get fat by eating either low quality or
| calorie dense food.
|
| You will get fat if you eat more than you need to
| maintain your weight.
|
| If anything, personal experience, with processed foods it
| can actually be easier to maintain weight because the
| calories are known.
| thablackbull wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-08-03
| /actual...
| shiroiushi wrote:
| In my observation, Americans are especially bad at
| managing their finances.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > I find it interesting that we have sayings like this, and
| sayings like "the market can stay irrational longer than you
| can stay solvent."
|
| We don't generally say that about small businesses that need
| cash flow
| philwelch wrote:
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| ghodith wrote:
| So the fix for over-regulation is more regulation, got
| it.
| philwelch wrote:
| > ridiculously low insurance minimums
|
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >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.
| philwelch wrote:
| > 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.
| y1n0 wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| dymk wrote:
| It would have been better for a business that provides more
| societal value to have been built.
| themadturk wrote:
| 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.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| > > 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.
| raincole wrote:
| Yeah, car washing, a business that is infamous for its
| enormous externalities...
| gwd wrote:
| 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.
| guappa wrote:
| You can only have so many cafes in an area... People
| won't drink more or buy more.
| Gormo wrote:
| > 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.
| mr_toad wrote:
| The social media complaints are probably Astro turfing by the
| existing car washes that don't want any more competition.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| 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!
| jrm4 wrote:
| 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.
| margalabargala wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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"
| pkulak wrote:
| > why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather
| than letting the market decide?
|
| 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.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >But we (mostly) don't
|
| 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.
| pkulak wrote:
| Property tax is mostly the structure though.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Property tax is not land tax.
| TylerE wrote:
| 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.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| If they don't have customers wouldn't we expect them to shut
| down at some point?
| TylerE wrote:
| 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.
| moomin wrote:
| I'd ask you what you think the purpose of a local politician
| is, if not to reflect the local people's wishes in the
| development of their area.
| I-M-S wrote:
| Ideally to optimize for long-term prosperity of the area
| while taking the needs of the greater community into account.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Clearly the "market", defined as a real estate syndicator with
| an excel sheet and cap table knows way more than the actual
| people who live in an area.
|
| It's not like Adam Smith's invisible finger didn't touch the
| cupcake bakery mania, froyo, etc.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's often a franchisee wave coming through.
|
| 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.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _dozens of hotels... feature not bug_
|
| One hotel (hub) with differentiated service levels could be
| more efficient, effective, and ecologically minded. Think Vegas
| casino property without the casino.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| 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.
| Terretta wrote:
| 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.
| nawgz wrote:
| 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.
| scruple wrote:
| 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.
| bux93 wrote:
| 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?
| brevitea wrote:
| Money Laundering.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Or real-estate shenanigans, for that matter. It makes me think
| of Mattress Firm having locations less than a mile from one
| another.
| cush wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/car-washes/
| sroussey wrote:
| There is a federal write off for car washes, so no real surprise.
|
| https://engineeredtaxservices.com/the-unique-benefits-of-cos...
| hobobaggins wrote:
| 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.
| sroussey wrote:
| Oh, sorry I thought the article had more detail.
|
| There is an accelerated depreciate for car washes that runs
| out in 2026 I think.
| sroussey wrote:
| Here is a better article:
|
| 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.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Same article, right?
|
| And there's nothing in there to do with car washes
| specifically, though? Just general MACRS etc?
| sroussey wrote:
| Not the same article.
|
| The tax act of 2017 has special provisions where almost
| nothing but car washes qualify.
| Antip0dean wrote:
| 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.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I've often wondered how legit those 'hand car washes' are.
| Legit or not, I'm sure it is hard work for crappy money.
| hobobaggins wrote:
| They're legit, and they make big tips when they work hard.
| jzb wrote:
| 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/
| tashoecraft wrote:
| I have worked as a tipped employee, and I have never heard
| a tipped employee say "wow that table/person didn't tip
| much, I should have worked harder"
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The comment I was referring to was talking about the UK,
| where we don't have a tipping culture in the same way the
| US does.
|
| >They're legit
|
| It is hard to know whethr they are working legally.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I can confirm they wash your car if you pay them to. Is that
| legit enough?
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 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.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Sorry it's conservative propaganda that illegal immigrants will
| work for very low wages at crappy jobs?
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| > It's the same with sex work, with which is harder to
| separate between conservative propaganda and reality.
|
| No?
| tom_ wrote:
| I guess they edited their post, because your quote no
| longer applies?
| lolinder wrote:
| The quote is from the GP.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 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).
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| 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.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| 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?
| to11mtm wrote:
| Depends...
|
| 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.
| eurleif wrote:
| 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.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I need to wash my cars at least once a week or they get
| filthy.
| callalex wrote:
| I just don't understand this attitude. Cars live outside,
| of course they will have a little dirt on them! Do you
| wash your house every week as well?
| bombcar wrote:
| It might _almost_ make sense if you wash your car weekly or
| more often during winter when they salt the roads.
|
| 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_.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Not once has the local automated wash suggested a
| subscription, is that perhaps a regional thing or specific to
| certain brands?
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| 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.
| to11mtm wrote:
| 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.
| seoulmetro wrote:
| Yep the only way you're getting your car manually washed in
| Australia is by foreigners or teens.
|
| 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.
| krupan wrote:
| tl;dr government interference
| cebert wrote:
| Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493919
| bell-cot wrote:
| True. But that's the same article, with 0-ish comments - so no
| value here.
| bell-cot wrote:
| The real cause - a "turn crank, make money" financial model:
|
| > But the industry's biggest recent innovation involves its
| business model, which has increasingly focused on membership and
| recurring revenue.
|
| ...
|
| > Now, washes can take just 90 seconds, labor costs have been
| automated down, and recurring revenue from memberships has
| eliminated weather risks. Plus, the tax reforms enacted in 2017
| by former president Donald Trump allowed car wash owners to claim
| 100% depreciation on new equipment -- a generous subsidy to
| further investment. While that incentive was written to shrink
| over time, the tax proposal currently in Congress would restore
| the 100% depreciation allowance.
|
| ...
|
| > In analyzing usage patterns, the industry soon found that the
| convenience of wash memberships translated to higher profits. A
| typical non-member may come in three or four times a year, while
| a typical member gets that many washes each month. But at $20 a
| month, that's a huge jump in annual spending -- more than enough
| to cover the costs of accommodating heavy users who may scrub
| their SUVs dozens of times a month.
|
| SO - at least where I live, the number of monthly
| payment/unlimited washes car washes has exploded in recent years.
| Even so, there's often a line (of very new, very expensive)
| vehicles waiting at them.
| lettergram wrote:
| The cynical me says - easy way to launder money (same with
| nutrition stores).
|
| You don't have to move much material and you can get large
| volumes of "sales"
| smeej wrote:
| Automated ones are fine, but what I've really missed since I
| moved to New England have been the ones where a team vacuums the
| inside, hoses off your mats, wipes your windows and dashboard
| inside, etc.
|
| Growing up in the West and Midwest, these things were absolutely
| normal for the first 30 years of my life. Some of them would even
| change the oil too. But I haven't found anywhere within 50 miles
| of me that will do it here. I'm not talking "detailing." This was
| $35 including the oil.
| tacomonstrous wrote:
| Yes, I remember when I first moved to New England, and asked
| where I could get a hand carwash. No one had heard of such a
| thing.
| throwaway_62022 wrote:
| I can find them in Georgia (far and few in-between) and they
| are super useful, if I must say - if not for folks across the
| border, hand carwashes will entirely disappear from US.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| PDQ!!! Still love that place, and they pay surprisingly well
| too. The wash is automated near me, but they do the hand-finish
| after, vacuum out, all the good stuff. I still get my car
| detailed once a year but PDQ is great between that.
| liquidpele wrote:
| One near us does this. It's like $100 now though.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I've lived in TX and FL and these types of services are
| everywhere. Even many of the automated carwashes where you
| vacuum your own car after the wash will usually charge an extra
| fee if you want the inside cleaned by staff.
| subpixel wrote:
| These are still normal where undocumented workers are willing
| to hustle for low pay and tips. In Queens I got a hand wash and
| interior detail for less than $50. Where I live now $225.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Labor costs arr too high for this to exist anymore.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That may depend on region. These still exist in the suburbs
| outside Birmingham, AL. Last I saw the prices varied from
| $15-30 for a wash, wax, detail, and hand dry.
|
| They don't offer an oil change though, I've never seen a
| wash+detail+oil change in the area. At scale I'd assume they
| could do it for closer to $50, if $35 was a 2005 price that's
| on par with inflation and beating inflation for some
| industries like food.
| smeej wrote:
| My most recent reference was $35 in Indianapolis in 2017.
| It doesn't surprise me that it'd be up, but it surprises me
| that it doesn't exist in New England. $60 wouldn't seem out
| of line to me, given that a quick lube station will change
| my oil for $20 and an automated car wash is another $17.
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| This existed in CA too, haven't seen $30 prices - oil+wash+hand
| dry... but those prices ended around 2005ish.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Sounds fantastic sadly it's easy to see why it doesn't exist.
|
| Oil changes require following environmental regs, careful
| disposal, paying for same and it makes a 1000x more sense to
| integrate them with a business that actually works on cars and
| can capture additional dollars for other maintenance and
| repair.
|
| You also want a comparatively skilled and trustworthy
| individual not someone who moved up from vacuuming to oil
| changes and a business than can easily write a check if their
| employee does mess up your expensive asset rather than an owner
| who will have to decide between writing you that check and
| paying their rent and employees. This is also why you don't
| want to get your oil change at walmart.
|
| If you could have it the oil change would have to cost $50-$60
| to justify its existence because there would be no chance of
| capturing additional revenue. If it had full service and 2
| people spent 15 minutes we are talking about another $30. This
| is only true if you can actually keep relatively busy and
| aren't implicitly bearing the cost of labor while people are
| waiting for customers.
|
| Then there is competition from both auto repair who are
| offering 29.99 oil changes and 5-9.99 automated car washes.
| smeej wrote:
| "Quick lube" stations are everywhere too though. $20 and out
| in 10 minutes. This was more like "quick lube plus car wash,"
| not "oil change, free 97 point inspection, and upsell on six
| things that aren't even wrong with your car."
| chasd00 wrote:
| Yeah some of the oil change places in my town don't even
| require you to get out of the car. You just pull up, read
| the news for a few minutes and then pay and drive off.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| There's one of these in Vancouver, on 4th ave. It's about CAD
| $32.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| M O N E Y
|
| L A U N D E R I N G
| karaterobot wrote:
| > The industry's growing footprint has not gone unnoticed.
| Complaints have erupted about traffic tie-ups, noise and chemical
| odors around locations, among other issues... City leaders have a
| limited number of car wash countermeasures at their disposal,
| such as withholding special use permits and enacting zoning
| changes to limit new locations.
|
| A nice summary of why things don't get fixed. There are
| legitimate problems with car washes: traffic tie ups, pollution.
| Instead of regulating to fix those problems, they regulate to
| limit the number of locations instead. So, the demand that exists
| isn't met, and nothing gets better because the existing
| businesses can continue being nuisances just like always.
| beejiu wrote:
| > 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.
|
| There's actually a game theory explantation for this called
| Hotelling's Law: https://sciencetheory.net/hotellings-law-1929/
| soared wrote:
| Pretty interesting read but seemingly doesn't hold super well
| in some real world situations. Extremely few goods have
| Inelastic demand and are purely differentiated by location -
| even car washes will have slightly different prices and
| services. (Even branding alone is a differentiator). But also
| the political section could not be further from the current
| climate:
|
| > 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
| codethatwerks wrote:
| X axis drug usage (street value), Y axis (number of car washes)
| throwup238 wrote:
| I think they're popular because they create induced demand. Most
| people only seek out car washes once they reach a certain
| dirtiness threshold but if the car wash is on the way home or at
| their favorite gas station, they tend to wash their cars much
| more frequently. There's four car washes within a half mile
| radius of my house that have been around for years but each of
| them is on a different artery connecting to the freeway so they
| cater to different markets so to speak. The area could probably
| support few more if the real estate weren't so competitive.
|
| IMO that's also why they all have monthly memberships with
| unlimited washes. The vast majority of their customers are
| regulars driving by on their way to work so the subscription
| makes sense for everyone.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Self-storage facilities, car washes, all sold on the grail of
| near-passive income.
|
| With a dying manufacturing base, at least it's better than
| selling hamburgers to each other.
|
| God I love this country.
| WoahNoun wrote:
| US manufacturing output is at an all time high. It just
| requires less employees to produce due to automation.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| With vacations so expensive we bring the kids to car washes as
| rides, they love it!
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| I really hate sounding like a broken record but this is just
| another instance of how low property taxes and the absence of
| land value taxes massively benefits low-value businesses.
|
| The real business of car washes is real estate, it's profitable
| enough to get 3-4x leverage with a low interest loan.
|
| TBH I think real estate used to have high information asymmetry
| between local residents and large investors; low property taxes
| and generous loan terms under this primarily benefited small
| businesses, individuals, etc. I think the internet and increased
| observability into far away projects erased this (a ring camera
| costs a billion dollar PE firm and Single home owner the same);
| now the same policies we have had are allowing easy arbitrage
| between low cost fed/PE cash and predictable "dumb" business
| categories; car wash, self storage, etc.
|
| I take pride in the fact I haven't been to a car wash in probably
| 3 years and have likely gone myself less than 10 times total.
| Rain and the occasional wet rag is good enough for a depreciating
| asset.
| _heimdall wrote:
| When you see a solution here of higher property taxes, is it
| focused on the raw land value or on the value of
| "improvements?"
|
| I've never been a fan of taxing the value of raw land, mainly
| because it creates incentives for destroying natural land and
| extracting as much value as possible from the space. Taxing
| structures based on the expected economic value can make sense,
| though even then if its a business there are more direct ways
| to tax the business's realized revenue or profits.
| mdasen wrote:
| Land value taxes aren't about destroying natural land to
| extract value.
|
| The point of taxing the value of the land in urban areas is
| that a lot of the time places essentially squat on land that
| could be better used. A car wash building will have a low
| assessed value for its improvements compared to a biotech
| building. For example, in my city we have a carwash with its
| improvements valued at $400,000 and a biotech building with
| its improvements valued at $275,000,000. The biotech building
| uses only double the land, but pays a ton more taxes.
|
| In my city, there are lots where they're basically abandoned.
| The owners know that they can just sit on the land and it'll
| increase in value over time even if it isn't used for a
| productive purpose. During this time, people need housing,
| businesses need office space, etc. This isn't "natural land",
| they're gravel pits.
|
| In fact, lack of a land value tax causes us to destroy
| natural land. Instead of using land well, we sprawl and pave
| our way into the suburbs and beyond.
|
| Not all land is equally valuable and land can be made non-
| valuable from the standpoint of a land value tax like parks
| and nature reserves. A land value tax isn't really meaningful
| in rural areas where the land isn't really that valuable due
| to its location. Where a land value tax is meaningful is in
| cities where land is scarce and we want to put it to good
| use.
|
| In a city, we don't want someone keeping an empty lot for
| decades so they can become richer based off the hard work of
| others around them - productive investors creating housing
| and office space, workers and artists making an area more
| desirable, etc. They sit on their empty lot paying nothing in
| taxes while others make them richer. A land value tax says:
| put that land to good use or your investment won't pay off
| that well. Under the current system based on improvements,
| they pay almost nothing and leech off the hard work of
| everyone else.
|
| Land value taxes don't destroy natural land. They'd probably
| preserve it. A land value tax might destroy surface parking
| lots in dense cities, but that isn't "natural land". They're
| a poor use of space. I live in one of the densest cities in
| the US and around the corner from a lot of 1-story retail. It
| would be better for the community if that retail had housing
| on top and a land value tax would encourage that.
|
| The alternative to encouraging good land use is having
| sprawl. Sprawl doesn't preserve natural land, it destroys it.
| It also destroys our climate with the carbon emissions from
| people who then drive everywhere.
|
| A land value tax isn't about taxing all land equally across
| the US. If you have land in an area where land is plentiful,
| then it doesn't have a high value (because it's plentiful)
| and it doesn't need to have a lot of value extracted from it.
| If you buy land in Manhattan, Boston, etc. and decide that
| you like it as an abandoned piece of property, that's not
| good for the community and there should be pressure on you to
| put it to better use or sell it to someone who will put it to
| good use. A land value tax is about taxing land in a way that
| prevents someone profiting off squatting on land.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Thanks for all the details! Limiting a land value tax to
| densely populated areas is a great detail here. Sorry if I
| end up with a long list of follow-up questions here, this
| is really interesting.
|
| So my main concern related to destruction of natural land
| is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you
| have to pay the tax anyway. In dense areas that wouldn't be
| nearly as much of an issue, but it would still mean that
| parks would be an unlikely occurrence and likely only
| feasible when run by the government. I assume most parks in
| these areas are anyway, so the loss may be limited to
| smaller neighborhood parks, courtyards, etc.
|
| Finding a clear way to draw a line between what area is
| dense enough to be taxed and what isn't seems like it would
| be an ongoing challenge. Not only would you have to define
| specific measures and thresholds, you would have to
| eventually move the line as the city evolved. Any thoughts
| on his this would be done, or already is in areas with a
| similar tax?
|
| When it comes to "best use" of a piece of land, who decides
| this? Does that measure really just boil down to whatever
| spends the most capital to build on the land, without
| regard for economic or social value, environmental impacts
| on the land and surrounding area, etc?
|
| It seems like this would lead to a lot of economic and
| social impacts that aren't necessarily desirable. Is there
| a clear way to guard this system from building higher and
| higher economic centers, inflating incomes and forcing even
| more of a wedge into the wealth gap? In you example, a car
| wash would be able to employee people at a lower once level
| in the area where a much more expensive biotech building
| would mostly employ highly educated people who bring much
| higher price pressure to the area. Can that be avoided with
| a tax that incentivizes building more expensive, and likely
| more technical/specialized, businesses on every plot of
| land?
|
| Related to that, what's the solution for infrastructure and
| resource requirements? Large biotech facilities would
| likely require more power, transportation and delivery
| access, maintenance, and building materials. If we are
| simultaneously concerned with environmental impact,
| creating incentives to build much larger building with much
| higher resource requirements flies in the face of this.
| Would we be creating a situation where businesses are
| pushed to use more energy, concrete, steel, and glass
| partly because a tax makes smaller businesses less
| feasible?
|
| ---
|
| Well that ended up being a bit of a brain dump with
| questions mixed in. If you made it this far, thanks for
| playing along!
| Retric wrote:
| > So my main concern related to destruction of natural
| land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural
| if you have to pay the tax anyway.
|
| There's no need to limit land value taxes based on
| density as that's what's giving land its value.
|
| With the property if the tax is say 0.2%. An acre of
| farmland worth in rural Idaho worth 20k would be assessed
| as being worth 20k in a land value tax and an acre of
| swamp might be worth 1,000$. Meanwhile an acre in
| Manhattan might be valued at 200 million, and the ~5
| orders of magnitude difference in taxation would
| therefore apply dramatically different results.
|
| The farmland's 40$/year in taxes isn't pushing anyone to
| sell, the swamp's 2$/year in taxes is irrelevant for most
| people. But eating 400k in taxes on a manhattan parking
| lot is definitely pushing someone to be more productive
| with it.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > The farmland's 40$/year in taxes isn't pushing anyone
| to sell
|
| I don't think that's an easy assumption to make. Cost of
| living, average income, and average plot size are very
| different in rural areas. I don't know Idaho so I can't
| speak to land value there, but I can say farmable land in
| rural Alabama goes for between $1k and $6k per acre
| depending on the land. If you really want to farm it for
| anything more than a homestead, 40+ acres is a minimum
| IMO. On the high end that works out to $480/year, but
| with an average income in the area closer to $25k/year
| that number isn't insignificant when its a tax just for
| the right to continue to own land I already bought. Add
| to that the extreme challenge of even breaking even in
| farming today, I'd be impressed if anyone farming 40
| acres in rural Alabama could reliably turn $25k in profit
| each year.
|
| Related to that while we're at it, what is the
| government's justification for taxing the value of land I
| own outright? Are we classifying land and property
| ownership as a privilege rather than a right? And in a
| rural area where land isn't changing hands as frequently
| and farmland can often sit for sale for months or years,
| how does the government accurately assess value? In my
| own experience land value in rural areas is only really
| adjusted when new structures are built or a specific
| parcel changes hands, but maybe that is handled
| differently elsewhere.
| BirdieNZ wrote:
| For land assessment, many countries or municipalities
| assess it regularly. In my country (New Zealand), most
| city councils re-assess land value and improvements value
| every three years (and charge council rates based on
| them).
| _heimdall wrote:
| Its probably more of a rural issue, but assessing value
| can be difficult when there aren't enough recent comps
| since the last major economic shift.
|
| I live on around 80 acres (30 hectares?). Our land is a
| bit unique in the area, and in general there hasn't been
| a single piece of land sold near us since before the
| pandemic and all the economic change that came with it. I
| don't know how the county could possibly know what our
| land is worth until something similar sells on the open
| market again.
| bregma wrote:
| > what is the government's justification for taxing the
| value of land I own outright?
|
| Well, where I live (which is not in the USA) value-based
| land taxes go to the municipality and the school board.
| They pay for municipal services I benefit from: fire,
| police, EMTs, road maintenance, waste collection and
| processing, recreational facilities like a park, a
| library, and a swimming pool. Also schools, but that gets
| more complicated since some funding for education also
| comes from a higher level of government which collects
| income taxes.
|
| Now mind, I live of 25 ha of swampland. But I get
| excellent value for my land-value-based land taxes.
| Retric wrote:
| > what is the government's justification for taxing the
| value of land I own outright?
|
| In the 1970's a group of people decided to setup a micro
| nation on a small unclaimed island. A nearby country
| Tonga seeing they where not protected by another state
| invaded, so ended the micro nation.
|
| Ultimately it's the US governments providing a military
| and police force that causes a piece of paper to have any
| impact on who controls a piece of land. Such services
| require payment. Though we charge for local services ie
| schools, EMS based with property taxes and protection
| FBI/Army based on people (income tax). Historically this
| favors land owners, but we could swap in the future.
| ufocia wrote:
| I'm not sure that it favors the land owners. Most of us
| presumably value our life over our worldly possessions.
| Retric wrote:
| By favor I simply mean the property tax level required to
| support a trillion dollar defense + VA + courts + police
| etc budget is larger than the current property tax rate.
| And without that type of spending owning the deed to some
| property would be pointless.
|
| Obviously we could lower defense spending but that's a
| separate question than simply the justification for
| property taxes.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| Thanks for that - fascinating story!
|
| http://www.queenoftheisles.com/HTML/Republic%20of%20Miner
| va....
| xeromal wrote:
| I just worry if there are valuable trees on a piece of
| land. It would be unfortunate for someone to own, say, 10
| acres of land with redwoods on them. If the wood is
| valued at a ton of money, that would encourage them to
| chop it down.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes - I think any such system should at least be
| restricted to urban areas (I'm not sure I've seen it
| proposed otherwise) and you'd need some careful work to
| have credits for functional ecosystems without having
| people try to scam it by claiming that the koi pond &
| tree on their mini golf course makes it a wildlife habit
| after a duck is spotted there.
| ufocia wrote:
| I'm not sure why a tree would not be considered a
| functional ecosystem. Perhaps giving incentives to people
| growing even individual trees is the thing to do.
| Otherwise people without trees are just freeloading of
| someone else's property.
| acdha wrote:
| That's why I said care. A tree as part of a larger garden
| in an area where insects and animals can reach it
| probably is good, but a palm tree in a sterile concrete
| swimming pool zone is unlikely to help and putting in a
| ton of invasive plants could actually be a problem.
| Ideally the incentives could be set based on support for
| native flora and fauna to discourage attempts to game it.
| If it's linked to a tax cut, you'll see every possible
| bad faith interpretation tried at least once.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > There's no need to limit land value taxes based on
| density as that's what's giving land its value.
|
| That can't be the case; density is an amenity and is, by
| definition, not part of the value of the land.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| The point of land value tax is to charge the same taxes
| on an empty lot as to a building close by on the same
| sized lot. Under regular property taxes a speculator
| might buy a building, tear it down, and sit on the vacant
| lot for years, as a vacant lot is worth less and so
| lowers their taxes. With a land value tax they pay the
| same money either way, which may be higher overall - the
| general expectation is denser cities would set the tax
| higher to encourage land to be put to more productive
| usage - taller buildings, ground floor retail to go with
| the apartments or office space, etc.
|
| Perhaps this isn't the value of the land as you would
| like to define it, but rather a way for local government
| to encourage land be put to more productive usage for
| everyone who lives or works nearby - without dictating
| exactly what that usage might be.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The problem with your comment is that you're appealing to
| a phrase, "land value tax", that isn't original to you.
| The definition you want to give to it is not compatible
| with the definition that everyone else uses. (And indeed,
| isn't even connected to the concept of "land value",
| making it unclear why you'd want to use those words.)
|
| This allows you to avoid the logical inconsistency in
| what counts as land value that most proponents commit, at
| the minor cost that nothing you say has any meaning. What
| happens when I try to respond to your new point of view
| and you reply that, actually, you mean something
| different by "money" than what is normally understood?
|
| What would you think if you voted to establish a "land
| value tax" and the tax that was put in place comported
| with the ordinary definition, instead of yours?
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| Land value tax already has a specific meaning as a class
| of tax systems. If it's poorly named from your point of
| view, I'm sorry - but I had nothing to do with the
| naming.
| ufocia wrote:
| You are assuming that all real estate owners are paying
| taxes.
|
| Also, in blighted areas buying improved land may actually
| be discouraged by LVT because of demolition costs. Thus
| vacant land should be more valuable than improved land.
| Can you resolve the paradox?
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > Can you resolve the paradox?
|
| What's the paradox?
|
| Two identical pieces of land, both pay the same in taxes,
| one requires more work to improve it (as it needs a tear
| down first). So that piece of land will sell for a lower
| price than its neighbor.
| sushibowl wrote:
| That seems like a strange definition to me. It's clear
| that people are willing to pay higher prices for land
| with amenities nearby, so by definition the value of the
| land is increased.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I think wires are getting crossed here on the "useful" or
| intrinsic value of land versus the market value. The GP
| was arguing that the land value is separate from outside
| considerations like amenities.
|
| People argue this over things like gold as well. IMO at
| the end of the day its impossible to tease apart anything
| other than the total market value, and I think that's
| where you are at as well sticking to the land's total
| market value.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
| ufocia wrote:
| But presumably at least some of the land owners are
| already paying more through paying for the presumably
| private amenities. Hence the fairness argument falls at
| least partially.
|
| Taxation is not about fairness, it's about raising
| revenue for the rather discretionary spending of the
| government.
| Retric wrote:
| 95+% of the value of land in LA is because it's in LA not
| because it's on the coast. Just compare land costs vs
| various properties ~1 mile from the ocean in Florida or
| Texas far from cities.
|
| Meanwhile you can an awesome spot in central WV with a
| nice stream an a scenic waterfall perfect view for a
| family home. But it's not worth much because it's far
| from restaurants, office paying six figures etc.
| etothepii wrote:
| The key point is that the value of the land is almost
| exclusively a function of other people's work.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Is that always the case? Sure land value is impacted by
| what else is around, but is that the nearly exclusive
| valuing factor everywhere?
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| On the parks/"natural land": would you rather land exist
| as an empty razed dirt field for speculators to wait to
| sell, or given back to the city?
|
| Taxing the land value means there's no incentive to own
| land that won't be productive. The city or municipality
| can guarantee land it owns can have natural growth on it,
| whereas when private individuals own it the state can't
| really stop the land from transforming into a parking
| lot.
|
| As to how to value the land: the market decides. What is
| the price for the land, if you took away all existing
| improvements on the land itself? There is usually enough
| vacant similar land around where this is pretty easy to
| figure out.
|
| The government can charge for services like upgraded
| electricity and keep the land value low, or they can
| bring the electricity to the land and count "lots of
| electricity available" as part of the value of the
| unimproved land.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > On the parks/"natural land": would you rather land
| exist as an empty razed dirt field for speculators to
| wait to sell, or given back to the city?
|
| That seems to be jumping to an extreme end, that someone
| owns an empty plot of land that has been cleared and
| destroyed to bare, dead dirt. My concern is that the same
| incentive pushing one to sell a pile of dirt would exist
| for someone owning an undeveloped, natural plot of land.
| My earlier caveat still exists, maybe this isn't a
| concern in dense areas though it would add some blockers
| for anyone interested in turning developed land back into
| a park.
|
| > Taxing the land value means there's no incentive to own
| land that won't be productive.
|
| One concern I have is the expectation that all land
| should be optimized for productivity. That goes against
| my own view on land, I don't think we humans have some
| innate right yo extract all available value. I also don't
| like that this likely goes against concerns of
| environmental impact.
|
| > The city or municipality can guarantee land it owns can
| have natural growth on it
|
| I can't quite put my finger on a better way to describe
| this, but it just feels off to me that only the state
| would be able to allocate land as parks, natural space,
| sanctuary, etc. Obviously what you are proposing wouldn't
| block anyone from doing this, but it would create
| incentives that make it unlikely.
|
| > As to how to value the land: the market decides.
|
| The market only decides on my land's value when I sell
| it. Until then, is the land valued at what I paid for it?
| If so that is at least predictable I suppose, that would
| be helpful so I know what my future tax burden would be.
|
| > The government can charge for services like upgraded
| electricity and keep the land value low, or they can
| bring the electricity to the land and count "lots of
| electricity available" as part of the value of the
| unimproved land.
|
| I wasn't just asking about how enough power gets to the
| land - not sure why the government would be responsible
| for that unless government and industry merge. I was
| meaning to ask with regards to the environmental impact
| angle. Taxing to create incentives to build as high-value
| improvements as possible would inevitably lead to a
| drastic increase in a locality's energy requirements.
| Where does it come from, and how do mitigate the
| environmental impact?
| crooked-v wrote:
| > That seems to be jumping to an extreme end
|
| If anything it's not extreme enough. Consider how much
| area in city downtowns is given over to paved-over
| parking lots that are just left to sit there rent-keeping
| for years. That's worse than just dirt fields, because at
| least the dirt fields can support life!
|
| > My concern is that the same incentive pushing one to
| sell a pile of dirt would exist for someone owning an
| undeveloped, natural plot of land.
|
| ...if the taxes are high enough to incentivize them to
| sell.
|
| If you have an undeveloped plot of land in a city where
| land taxes are high, you _should_ be incentivized to
| either sell that to someone who will make use of it, or
| donate it to the city to serve as a public park, rather
| than getting to have your own private green space
| somewhere that space is at a premium for everyone else.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > If you have an undeveloped plot of land in a city where
| land taxes are high, you should be incentivized to either
| sell that to someone who will make use of it, or donate
| it to the city to serve as a public park
|
| Why must land goes used? Is the assumption that we must
| fully utilize every inch of land in a city, regardless of
| what people living there or the land owner wants?
|
| Building on as much usable space in an already high
| density area can and has had downsides that seem to get
| overlooked in this thread. Higher density means more
| traffic, higher demand on infrastructure and utilities,
| and the need to bring in even more resources from outside
| the city and send out even more waste for someone else to
| deal with (to name a few).
|
| This assumption that taxing land high enough to make sure
| that none of it is left undeveloped _unless_ the city
| owns it is begging for runaway problems, unless these
| other considerations are factored in. Doing so almost
| certainly means not having the tax, as the goal of more
| dense development competes with the other concerns.
| ufocia wrote:
| I'm aware of areas where real estate taxes are high and
| large swaths of land are owned by private non-profit
| conservation organizations.
| lmm wrote:
| > That seems to be jumping to an extreme end, that
| someone owns an empty plot of land that has been cleared
| and destroyed to bare, dead dirt. My concern is that the
| same incentive pushing one to sell a pile of dirt would
| exist for someone owning an undeveloped, natural plot of
| land. My earlier caveat still exists, maybe this isn't a
| concern in dense areas though it would add some blockers
| for anyone interested in turning developed land back into
| a park.
|
| If you're not doing anything with land in an in-demand
| area then it creates an incentive to sell it, yes -
| that's pretty much the point. Realistically, undeveloped
| lots in in-demand areas (i.e. cities) are not nice
| natural landscapes - they're dirt yards at best. It takes
| a lot of work to maintain a park, and frankly putting a
| tax on land is more likely to return some of those unused
| lots to the city who could then open a public parks
| there, than discourage someone who was maintaining a park
| privately.
|
| Even in the country, land that's completely untended is
| rarely pleasant, although in places where land isn't
| worth much, a tax like this won't make much difference
| either way.
|
| > One concern I have is the expectation that all land
| should be optimized for productivity. That goes against
| my own view on land, I don't think we humans have some
| innate right yo extract all available value. I also don't
| like that this likely goes against concerns of
| environmental impact.
|
| The idea that someone owns land like chattel and can do
| whatever they want with it is surely worse from that
| point of view. If you're taxed on the value of your land,
| you're incentivised to use as little as possible, and
| leave the rest for the public or nature - e.g. if you can
| build a factory in half as much space, you've halved your
| tax bill.
|
| > The market only decides on my land's value when I sell
| it. Until then, is the land valued at what I paid for it?
|
| No, there would need to be an assessment process,
| although perhaps backed by a market mechanism (i.e. if
| you think the assessment is too high you can ask the
| government to buy you out at that amount, or some such).
|
| > Taxing to create incentives to build as high-value
| improvements as possible would inevitably lead to a
| drastic increase in a locality's energy requirements.
|
| It doesn't create a new incentive to build more unless
| the more you're building is valuable. You can densify by
| building more in the same space yes, but you can also
| densify by building the same in less space, and that's
| what saves you money so presumably that's what people
| will do (after all, if building more was profitable,
| wouldn't people already be building more)? For the same
| amount of economic activity, you'll require the same
| amount of energy, just in a smaller space, which again is
| likely to be more efficient and better for the
| environment (the same number of factories in half the
| space means fewer cables, less transmission losses etc.).
|
| Now of course if you make business more efficient then
| maybe you end up with more business, but isn't that a
| good thing? Again it only makes sense to build more if
| there's demand for it - otherwise you're better off
| staying small and cutting your expenses. Land value tax
| might even help encourage people to not expand
| prematurely - if doubling the size of your warehouse
| means paying more tax, maybe you'll put it off a few
| years until you're actually going to use that space.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > frankly putting a tax on land is more likely to return
| some of those unused lots to the city
|
| This seems like a really dangerous justification, and
| frankly one that would be a complete no-go for me. You
| just made it clear that the goal, at least in part, is to
| make a tax so high that it more often goes unpaid and the
| city can take the land away from the land owner. They
| might as well skip the game and claim eminent domain.
| lmm wrote:
| > You just made it clear that the goal, at least in part,
| is to make a tax so high that it more often goes unpaid
| and the city can take the land away from the land owner.
|
| Have you ever lived near an empty lot or abandoned
| building in a city? Yes, I want those going back into
| circulation, whether via the owner doing something with
| them, selling them to someone who will, or it falling to
| the city. You do know we're in a housing crisis? There
| simply isn't enough space to go round, something has to
| give; I'd rather see those absentee landowners who don't
| care enough to do the minimum lose their stuff than have
| hard working people living n to a room like we do now.
| ufocia wrote:
| > The city or municipality can guarantee land it owns can
| have natural growth on it
|
| Only if the city/municipality has money to do so. A
| degenerate example is where the city/municipality own all
| of the land and thus has no real estate tax base. You may
| think that this is ridiculous, but check out some
| blighted areas around the US and you'll see plenty of
| local governments that have a very shallow real estate
| tax base reminiscent of the "ridiculous" argument.
| hackerlight wrote:
| > Is there a clear way to guard this system from building
| higher and higher economic centers
|
| Sorry, is this a bad thing?
|
| On the social side: In the current system, poor people
| are forced to live in ghettos and spend 2 hours a day on
| a round-trip commute. It's too expensive to live near
| their work. If we had a land tax, the rich enclaves near
| the city are now financially incentivized to open up
| their public schools and areas to poor(er) people by
| building vertically. The current incentives point in the
| opposite direction.
|
| On the environment side: We will have less sprawl, and by
| extension less environmental damage. It requires less
| concrete, less energy, less roads, less driving, less
| shops, less train lines, etc, to serve a dense area, on a
| per-capita basis. You are however correct that natural
| reserves are a _public good_ , technically speaking, and
| an efficient land tax system will need to account for
| public goods in its implementation. This is an important
| implementation detail that I'd defer to economists.
| > Related to that, what's the solution for infrastructure
| and resource requirements?
|
| Use the revenue from the tax to build infrastructure.
| Obviously it can't be an overnight thing, but we can do
| it over a decade-like time horizon.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| So in other words, issue some bonds to make future tax
| revenue pay for the current expenditures to build the
| infrastructure.
| hackerlight wrote:
| The temporal misalignment might not be so bad.
| Residential dwelling construction and public
| infrastructure should both lag the actual tax revenue.
| ufocia wrote:
| I also thought this was bad until I gave it some thought
| recently. I'm not saying that I'm out of that camp
| completely because I think that the approach in some
| cases leads to overspending and may increase the overall
| cost in real, not just nominal, terms.
|
| However, bonding out projects does spread the expenditure
| in time, more directly charging the future users for
| infrastructure they use. Sure you could recoup the costs
| through user fees, but then you're effectively borrowing
| money from the current tax base, so "bonds" by another
| name.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Both of these scenarios are a gamble and not guaranteed.
|
| On the social side: the gamble is that social growth will
| outpace the increased economic pressure. Meaning, you
| need the new vertical growth to create opportunities
| faster than it increases prices further in the area. A
| land tax alone wouldn't pull people out of poverty,
| create affordable housing, or open up public school.
| Those are all just potential avenues for the city to
| develop, not guarantees.
|
| On the environment: cities aren't isolated enclaves.
| Resources needed to build, maintain, and feed the city
| all come from the outside world. The more you build up
| the more steel, concrete, glass, energy, etc is needed.
| The more people packed into the city the more food you
| need to ship in and waste you need to ship out.
| eppsilon wrote:
| Sprawling low density cities consume resources too. Mass
| transit is less effective, so more people must buy and
| drive cars. Roads and highways are wider and more
| extensive. Cars need storage at the origin and
| destination of every trip, so homes need driveways or
| garages and businesses need parking lots. Other
| infrastructure must expand too: power lines, water/sewer
| pipes, communication wires, and so on.
|
| One million people would need about the same amount of
| food/energy if they lived in 1,000 sq. mi. as they would
| if they lived in 100 sq. mi. But the cost per person to
| house and transport people in a dense city is lower than
| in a sprawling one.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > For example, in my city we have a carwash with its
| improvements valued at $400,000 and a biotech building with
| its improvements valued at $275,000,000.
|
| That's well and good, but, you know, people still want to
| wash their cars, and probably don't feel like driving 30
| miles out of town to do it.
| carbocation wrote:
| The pro-land value tax response is that, if someone
| really believed people highly valued washing their cars
| in the city, one could open up a car wash on expensive
| land. If people really don't want to drive 30 minutes but
| also really want to wash their car, they can pay more to
| use this expensive in-town car wash. It is of course
| possible that the economics wouldn't make sense to
| support such a use of urban land in the densest/highest
| value areas.
| fragmede wrote:
| The car wash also doesn't have to be the only thing on
| that land. build up - put a high-rise up and have a car
| wash at the ground level.
| carbocation wrote:
| Great point. Maybe you get clever with it and make it an
| amenity for your building and charge a lot for others who
| want to use it (etc).
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Lol, that's ridiculous. You can't have a city that's full
| of biotech labs and nothing else. But, according to your
| logic, that's what would happen. You're not "preserving"
| anything. You're encouraging every last square meter of
| ground to be strip mined for whatever "value" one can get
| out of it.
| smallerfish wrote:
| > Land value taxes don't destroy natural land. They'd
| probably preserve it.
|
| Consider a farm on the edge of town. Without LVT, the
| incentive to sell could be considered positive; i.e. the
| farmer may sell when they're offered sufficient money for
| it. With LVT, the incentive to sell could be considered
| negative; they will be charged more and more in taxes from
| the state as the town develops up to the boundary of the
| farm until they can no longer afford _not_ to sell. That
| means that there is a built in sprawl function to LVT -
| towns will continue eating up the countryside as their
| centers push value of land up around them.
| ufocia wrote:
| In some places farms already pay LVT like real estate
| taxes. Their real estate taxes are based on the value of
| potential farming operations on the land.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| To be honest, I think you have it exactly backwards, and a
| land value tax isn't about taxing "raw land" (that is, land
| with no improvements), it's about taxing the _value_ of the
| land without regard to improvements.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
| _heimdall wrote:
| Would the land go untaxed until there are improvements? If
| not, the raw land value itself is being taxed.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| No. The land would be taxed whether it has improvements
| or not, and in fact would be taxed _the same amount_
| whether improved or not. That 's how such a tax
| incentivizes improvement - if you're paying the tax
| either way, you want to do as much as possible with it to
| get your money's worth.
| sethammons wrote:
| Which encourages destruction of natural lands
| alexb_ wrote:
| "Land" is shorthand for all of the natural resources on
| this earth. That means space, but it also means clean air
| and anything else extracted. Pollution and extraction
| taxes are different forms of land taxes.
| Gormo wrote:
| So the proposal is that people should never be able to
| use the land they own for their own purposes without the
| threat of being dispossessed because strangers are
| willing to pay more for it, even if they don't want to
| sell?
|
| That sounds like a horrible situation, and it seems clear
| why real-world tax systems don't take this approach to
| its ultimate conclusion.
|
| There's also something very objectionable about
| attempting to use taxation as a tool to manipulate
| behavior and engineer outcomes. Where taxation is
| justifiable, it is justifiable solely as a pragmatic
| means to fund the necessary operations of government, and
| never as an end in itself.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| At the risk of feeding a troll... no, that is not the
| proposal. The proposal is to make it economically
| unviable to do socially suboptimal things with common
| resources.
|
| The underlying principle is that land - including natural
| resources as a whole - is finite. It's a common good
| owned by humanity as a whole; or, failing that, at least
| in common by the nation-state in which it falls. Allowing
| individuals to hoard those finite resources is bad for
| society.
|
| Under a land-value tax system, individuals _can_ do
| whatever they want, but they 're appropriately charged
| for their negative externalities. Just like we should
| have a carbon tax to disincentivize people using the
| shared natural resource of carbon fixing without a good
| reason, we should have a land tax to disincentivize
| people using the shared natural resource of flat, arable
| land without a good reason. You _can_ choose to pay your
| taxes and do nothing with the land, if you have another
| source of wealth to make up for it - effectively, you
| need to express to society just how much it 's worth it
| to you to sit on that land doing nothing, and the way
| that we express the strength of our convictions in a
| market economy is with dollars.
|
| > There's also something very objectionable about
| attempting to use taxation as a tool to manipulate
| behavior and engineer outcomes.
|
| The goal here is not to manipulate behavior for its own
| sake, it's to use the power of the state to correct for a
| mispricing in the market. Market forces alone are
| incapable of correctly pricing deals involving common
| goods, because most of the people who are implicitly
| participating in the transaction (i.e., the rest of
| humanity that is now deprived of that land/air/resource)
| are not compensated. It's a problem of negative
| externalities, for which a Pigouvian tax [1] is a
| perfectly appropriate remedy. In a democracy, the state
| _is_ how the public as a whole imposes its collective
| will; having the state "bid" on behalf of the public
| interest is the most capitalist solution possible to the
| externalities problem.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| Only if implemented naively.
|
| The idea of LVT is to put an economic value (i.e. dollar
| amount) on the fact that you're preventing people from
| using land. It's a market correction. If you want to
| express that some values are actually good beyond what
| the market is equipped to reward, then you need to
| correct further. In theory, this means that the
| government - acting on behalf of the public good, or its
| citizens, or the future of humanity, or whatever your
| preferred vision for the social contract is - should
| offer its own contribution to the cost to be paid. In
| practice, this means there could be a significant tax
| credit for meaningful nature preserves, commensurate with
| the value of that preserve. Taken to its limit, this tax
| credit could mean a negative tax (i.e. subsidy) that's
| enough to pay for maintaining the land in its natural
| state, and oh look we just reinvented public parks.
| ejb999 wrote:
| So where do the animals pay their taxes so they have some
| place to live after we make it economically un-feasible
| to keep land undeveloped by taxing raw land out of
| existence?
| itishappy wrote:
| Where do they currently?
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| Animals don't get a vote, but just as the government can
| forcibly set aside land as parks, the government can
| subsidize individuals to do so where it would be valuable
| to the common good.
| chongli wrote:
| The value of the land is not solely based on the "raw
| land." As they say in real estate, it's all about
| location, location, location! A half-acre beachfront plot
| in Malibu is worth orders of magnitude more than a half-
| acre of grassland in Montana. A lot of the value comes
| from the beachfront itself, yes, but a lot more of the
| value comes from all the development around it.
|
| This is the whole basis for the business model behind
| golf course development. Developers acquire a large plot
| of land in a nice area and build a golf course on part of
| it. The rest of the land (surrounding the golf course) is
| divided up into plots and used to build luxury housing.
| The existence of the golf course (and all of the
| landscaping in the area in general) dramatically
| increases the desirability (and hence property value) of
| the houses.
|
| If you didn't build the golf course at all you could fit
| more houses on the land overall. The problem with that is
| that without the golf course the houses are less
| desirable and worth less -- and also more capital
| intensive to build than a golf course -- so the overall
| profit is lower.
| ufocia wrote:
| There is that, of course. But good courses also permit
| real estate companies to hold land for future development
| at a reduced cost, maybe even a profit, no?
| itishappy wrote:
| Is that desirable? To take valuable land and profit from
| not using it? This seems like exactly what a land-value
| tax attempts to address.
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you, but your comment
| reminded me of this tax loophole, which fills me with rage
| everytime I see a new self-storage style business being
| "constructed."
|
| https://boxwell.co/section-179-tax-benefit-for-
| relocatable-s...
|
| >Relocatable storage units are portable and moveable.
| Therefore, they can be classified as equipment instead of as
| a building or permanent structure. Not only does this help
| self-storage operators bypass the lengthy process of
| permitting and zoning. But it's also a great tax advantage
| when classifying these convenient storage units as equipment.
| In most cases, the units are eligible for 100% deduction
| after just one year.
|
| edit typo
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| > I take pride in the fact I haven't been to a car wash in
| probably 3 years and have likely gone myself less than 10 times
| total.
|
| You don't come off here as well as you think you do.
| paulmd wrote:
| Ya, he's bragging about letting his frame and underbody rust
| out.
|
| (must be nice to live in a place without salt on the roads!)
| smt88 wrote:
| Most of humanity lives in a place without salt on roads (or
| doesn't own a car).
|
| I've never washed a car I've owned and my frame is fine.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Depends where you live. In Texas you want to wash
| occasionally and reapply some type of wax or you'll lose
| your clear coat in a few years to UV damage.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Sand on roads, no rust.
| Spivak wrote:
| I really don't get what this is implying, commuter cars are
| essentially self-cleaning. You're driving on roads where the
| worst that's gonna happen is some salt buildup in winter that
| isn't worth washing off in winter (and isn't rusting in
| winter) and then it washes itself off first rain of spring.
|
| This feels like one of those iceberg tips where I'm really
| glad I'm not in the kind of social circle where having a
| spotless car matters at all.
|
| I've driven four going on five cars to 200k miles having
| never gave any shits about car washes and haven't had any
| problems.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I think it's pretty normal for people to want to take good
| care of things they've spent hard earned money on. Is
| driving a filthy car some kind of weird flex?
| makeitshine wrote:
| He's saying it rains and the car gets clean.
|
| I only needed to rinse my car off once a year, max, and
| did that with a garden hose. It was fine otherwise. Car
| washes are a waste.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I live in the PNW where it rains pretty steadily most of
| the year and my car gets absolutely gross if I don't wash
| it once every couple months. Not dusty, I mean filthy
| dirty. Rain does not make the car clean, quite the
| opposite. All that water on the road getting kicked up
| brings muck with it.
| snuxoll wrote:
| I live in an area of the PNW where it snows and rains a
| lot during the winter, and rains more during the summer.
| Mud loves to stick to everything, and the Magnesium
| Chloride they use to de-ice roads loves to oxidize the
| frame of vehicles.
|
| I have everything at home to clean our vehicles, but I
| can't just run the hose during the winter when it's most
| important because of the MgCl; so I'll take our rigs to
| the wash if we are in town (nearest car wash is 60
| minutes away) to clean the undercarriage and minimize
| rusting.
| sapling-ginger wrote:
| A dusty car body is no more "filthy" than the soles of
| your shoes. Do you wash your shoe soles?
| yanokwa wrote:
| People who are into shoes (e.g., sneakerheads) do clean
| their soles.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It doesn't get merely dusty unless you live somewhere
| very dry. I live in the PNW and it rains a good portion
| of the year. The car gets absolutely filthy during the
| rainy season.
|
| If my shoes were that dirty, then heck yeah I would clean
| them. What a mess, it's easy to get your clothes dirty
| when the outside of your car is filthy. My kid's white
| dobok is especially sensitive to dirt on the car.
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| Yeah, it's probably a regional thing. Here in Colorado,
| most cars don't really get that gross. I take a hose to
| mine like 3 times a year and dry it with a towel and it
| looks pretty nearly pristine. They'll only get very dusty
| if you take them on dirt roads a lot, or keep them in a
| garage all the time without ever cleaning them. Ones kept
| outside will keep mostly clean due to the rain, with
| maybe a little bit of grime under overhangs, and some sun
| damage on the paint.
| chaorace wrote:
| If torn jeans can be a fashion statement, then so too can
| an unwashed car. Let them have this, why don't you?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm perfectly happy to let them have this, I was just
| curious why someone would deliberately neglect basic
| maintenance. It's kinda foreign to me, and frankly I'm
| towards the lazy end of the motivation scale.
|
| Fashion statement is actually a pretty good explanation,
| thank you.
| makoto12 wrote:
| it's not maintenance if it's for aesthetic purposes.
| unless there's a serious concern for rust then i don't
| think it classifies.
| kodt wrote:
| If you live in an area where they heavily salt the roads
| washing is important to get all that road salt off of
| your car as it does speed the process of rusting.
| Neglecting to do this will result in rust spots on your
| body. Most of the comments here seem to be taking highly
| individual situations and assuming it must be the same
| for everyone.
| superhuzza wrote:
| I live in the UK, where it rains multiple times a week. I
| mostly drive on paved roads, not too much mud, roads are
| rarely salted.
|
| Whether I wash my car or not, it changes nothing - the
| car will get dusty and rained on over and over regardless
| of what I do. When I first got my car I would wash it
| sometimes, but it's inevitably going to rain in the next
| day or so and return to exactly the same state. Washing
| it once a year is enough to remove any grease/carbon from
| the roads.
|
| Why bother? I don't think it's actually "maintenance" if
| it doesn't maintain the car in any meaningful way.
| chaorace wrote:
| > Why bother? I don't think it's actually "maintenance"
| if it doesn't maintain the car in any meaningful way.
|
| As usual, it varies. Some outdoor environments can cause
| pollen/pinetar/birdpoop to accumulate and form a layer of
| weather-resistant plaque which slowly degrades the paint.
| Some indoor storage environments are open-air, which can
| lead to a stubborn buildup of oil/pollution/dust with a
| similarly negative impact.
|
| Of course, there's also the general idea that, if you
| baby something, it'll last longer. Inspecting how the car
| looks on a semi-regular basis might lead one to noticing
| any number of issues -- a soft tire, a fluid leak, a
| faulty tail-light, etc. It's not a bad ritual to have if
| you rely on the good working function of such things.
|
| With all of this being said, I don't exactly practice
| what I preach... Driving bores me and I'd rather pay
| someone else to do the associated maintenance even though
| I've been thoroughly taught how to do it myself. I very
| much belong to the "carwashes for thee and not for me"
| school of thought
| 3weeksearlier wrote:
| Depends on the climate. In parts of California, rain can be
| rare.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Exactly. I paid a small amount extra for hydrophobic
| coating 15 years ago, and basically have never bothered to
| wash the bodywork since then, and only now are a couple of
| rust problems starting to emerge. Unless you bought a white
| car, as foolish a project as wearing white trousers, the
| everyday dust isn't very visible. I find myself manually
| washing the windows much more often, though, since there
| cleanliness actually matters.
| golergka wrote:
| Why would you assume OP owns a car or has any use for a
| rental one?
| WWLink wrote:
| I don't get it? When I wash my cars I like to go all out and
| clay them and wax them. And then the next morning there's a
| nice layer of dust. And the morning after that the morning
| dew has cemented that dust on.
|
| Even a 3 year old car that has been washed twice a week at an
| automatic wash is going to look a lot worse than a 5 year old
| car that occasionally gets a good hand wash. The constantly
| auto washed car is going to be full of swirls and maybe even
| a screwed up antenna or spoiler or rear wiper blade because
| car washes like eating those.
|
| Plus even the most aggressive automatic car wash isn't going
| to actually CLEAN a car. Even the laziest 20 minute
| rinse/soap/rinse/dry is going to clean a car better than an
| automatic car wash does. And if you use good microfiber
| towels ($13 for a pack of 36 at costco) and pretty much any
| microfiber sponge ($5 at walmart or whatever), and something
| like meguairs gold class wash and wax ($15 for a big bottle
| at walmart) you're set for at least 2-3 years.
|
| Err anyway... "doesn't take care of their stuff" - I reserve
| that for people who never clean the inside of their car,
| people who ram into curbs and mess up their bumper getting
| out, and people who slam their doors into other peoples'
| cars.
| kodt wrote:
| Garage
| 55555 wrote:
| can you please elaborate on this? i don't understand exactly.
| "The real business of car washes is real estate, it's
| profitable enough to get 3-4x leverage with a low interest
| loan"
| killingtime74 wrote:
| The OP asserts (I agree) that the real profit from running a
| car wash is not the daily turnover of car washing, but the
| capital appreciation of the land the car wash sits on. The
| part about leverage assumes you are able to get a
| loan/mortgage to purchase the land the car wash sits on. In
| effect you are using the car wash as a reason to justify a
| mortgage you wouldn't otherwise be able to get for real
| estate speculation alone.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Correct. Just as the McDonald's Corporation is really in
| the real estate business. Burgers and fries are just their
| side line.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _this is just another instance of how low property taxes and
| the absence of land value taxes massively benefits low-value
| businesses_
|
| Thank god we haven't optimized that fully. This is how small
| businesses like local cafes, delis, bookstores, and "mom and
| pop" stores are able to survive in cities.
|
| I wouldn't want to live in any capitalist shit-hole where land
| value taxes force high-value businesses.
| 3weeksearlier wrote:
| I used to live in an expensive/touristy area that became more
| so over time, and it was annoying how every unique shop that
| closed get replaced by a fancy clothing store.
| lmm wrote:
| > This is how small businesses like local cafes, delis,
| bookstores, and "mom and pop" stores are able to survive in
| cities.
|
| Nonsense. Those aren't the businesses that take up masses of
| land - hell, a lot of the best of those are run by people who
| live above the store, meaning the extra land use is zero. The
| businesses that benefit from a lack of land value tax are
| parking lots, drive thrus, distribution centres, that sort of
| thing.
| sytelus wrote:
| This doesn't make sense. There are tons of other business which
| will have higher day to day return _and_ property appreciation.
| I don 't think anyone was craving for car wash subscription and
| I don't know of anyone having car wash in their checklist
| monthly item. Those people exist for sure but not in that kind
| of demand that a town needs even two of them.
|
| I think this is just another instance where private equity is
| creating imaginary business model of subscriptions and selling
| it to its investors. The money managers will get huge
| management fees and will disappear before the whole thing
| collapses in coming years. Meanwhile, they will run a lot of
| good and necessary businesses out of town.
| BirdieNZ wrote:
| It's hard to think of many businesses that require lower
| capital investment and maintenance than a car wash. The ones
| I see in my city that look like land banking are a big plot
| with asphalt covering it (don't even need to mow lawns), a
| few awnings with some plumbing for hoses and soap and other
| gear, and nothing else. Even a laundromat would cost more to
| set up.
| frumper wrote:
| https://www.carwashadvisory.com/learning/how-much-costs-
| buil...
|
| These car washes are not simple, nor cheap. They aren't
| talking about places where you wash your own car, they're
| talking about the increase in automated ones.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| >...this is just another instance of how low property taxes and
| the absence of land value taxes massively benefits low-value
| businesses.
|
| The government also benefits from sales taxes, licenses,
| permitting fees, etc.
| lmm wrote:
| > The government also benefits from sales taxes, licenses,
| permitting fees, etc.
|
| They won't be getting much in the way of sales tax if the
| business is low-value, by definition.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you live in a high snow area? I wash my
| car pretty regularly once the road salt starts coming out, most
| car washes here do some manner of undercoat to help with the
| salt rust.
| dinp wrote:
| Somehow the idea of perpetually paying property taxes and land
| value taxes doesn't sound appealing to me, especially since
| businesses already pay taxes. I don't understand the argument
| of designing a system to hurt a specific business type such as
| low value businesses. If there's a loophole such as lack of
| sales tax for car washes, fix that, but let the playing field
| remain even. If desirable high value businesses aren't able to
| compete with car washes, isn't that the market doing it's
| thing? Introducing additional property and land value taxes
| might discourage low value businesses, but what are the 2nd and
| 3rd order effects of such a change?
| lmm wrote:
| > I don't understand the argument of designing a system to
| hurt a specific business type such as low value businesses.
|
| The argument is that good business spots are a limited
| community resource that it makes sense to tax, like radio
| spectrum. If you can make good use of the space you're taking
| up, go ahead, but you should compete fairly with other uses
| of the space. If anything taxing space use makes more sense
| than taxing profits; a profitable business is probably one
| that's serving the community well, whereas a business that
| takes up space and doesn't generate much profit is no good
| for anyone. From the article:
|
| > "A car wash does not provide a lot of jobs for the
| community, and they take up a lot of space," Broska said. "If
| you want to invest your dollars into a car wash, then God
| bless you. But at the same time, I'm responsible for 17,500
| people and have to be cognizant of their wishes."
|
| > the largely automated facility wasn't the best use for a
| prominent Main Street site
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| To add to this, LVTs encourage more homes near job rich
| areas of the city. This in turn means more people can live
| nearby and have a shot at a job.
| brailsafe wrote:
| > a profitable business is probably one that's serving the
| community well, whereas a business that takes up space and
| doesn't generate much profit is no good for anyone.
|
| I think that attributes a lot more to profitability than
| such a metric deserves. Perhaps in a more narrow and
| ruthlessly capitalistic sense profitability signifies that
| a business is doing what it's trying to do well, but it's a
| big leap to get from there to how well its serving whatever
| is considered to be a community these days. Among other
| problems, just because some tiny amount of that money
| conceivably stays around in the region and people can buy
| stuff does not mean that the cost of the business being
| there isn't quite a lot higher, hence the term tragedy of
| the commons and the hollowing out of let's say America
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| > a profitable business is probably one that's serving the
| community well
|
| This argument reminds of the argument googlers to explain
| why placing paid ads ahead of organic results is better for
| the user: they say thay if someone can pay more for an ad
| than means that can get more money from the user, and
| therefore the user likes it more. Lol
|
| No, profit is profit, it doesn't mean anything else.
| brhsagain wrote:
| What's wrong with that argument? Doesn't getting more
| money from the user mean that the user is choosing to pay
| more, which reveals their preference?
| gotbeans wrote:
| No, it does not. That the users end up paying more in no
| way means or should be implied that they _choose_ to pay
| more.
|
| If cheaper options are made less accessible or clearer,
| and customers are intentionally mislead to more expensive
| products, as a result they will pay more too.
| ufocia wrote:
| Also, there is a cost associated with searching.
| Consumers may intentionally forego the effort for
| perceived low marginal gains (especially in nominal
| rather than percentage terms, e.g. "I'm not going to
| waste my time to save a quarter." even if the quarter is
| a significant percentage difference). This is one of the
| factors in the success of Amazon. People "value"
| convenience.
| Gormo wrote:
| But people will not pay more than a product is worth to
| them. The fact that they are willing to purchase the
| product at a higher price point indeed does imply that
| that price point is still lower than the consumption
| utility of the product for them.
| kmacdough wrote:
| *In a healthy competitive market with a consumer-base
| that's well educated on potential consequences of their
| purchases.
|
| I do agree with the principle that a space-hogging
| marginally profitable business is detrimental to a
| community. Just that the opposite is not necessarily
| true; profitability does not imply beneficiality.
|
| Humans do not fit the model of "rational self-interested
| agent" commonly applied for economic models. Gambling and
| addictive substances are two hugely profitable business
| sectors that would not exist if it we're remotely
| accurate.
|
| I'll also preempt someone's inevitable assertion that the
| burden of verification should lie on the consumer. In
| informationally antagonistic environment, it's absurd to
| expect each individual to individually vet every service
| and product. That's a phenomenal waste of labor that
| favors only well-funded organizations practiced in
| deception. Any rational group would pool resources and
| have a single org do the research and share it with
| everyone. Oops we've reinvented a government.
| bboygravity wrote:
| "Any rational group would pool resources and have a
| single org do the research and share it with everyone.
| Oops we've reinvented a government."
|
| I thought you where talking about Google Maps reviews but
| OK.
| a_gnostic wrote:
| > Humans do not fit the model of "rational self-
| interested agent
|
| > Any rational group would pool resources and have a
| single org do the research and share it with everyone.
| Oops we've reinvented a government.
|
| The firse quote precludes the second.
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| I disagree... the diff lies in the definition of "humans"
| vs. "group". It's like the quote in the movie MIB "Kay :
| A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous
| animals and you know it"
| Gormo wrote:
| > Humans do not fit the model of "rational self-
| interested agent" commonly applied for economic models.
|
| They generally do -- the misalignment comes from
| analyzing people's behavior according to presumptive
| interests which have been externally attributed to them,
| instead of observing behavior in order to ascertain what
| people's interests actually are.
|
| > Gambling and addictive substances are two hugely
| profitable business sectors that would not exist if it
| we're remotely accurate.
|
| No, gambling and addictive substances exist because
| people enjoy them. Large numbers of people exhibit a
| manifest preference for short-term pleasure over long-
| term stability; expecting such people to act in ways that
| pursue long-term stability over short-term pleasure is
| itself irrational.
|
| > I'll also preempt someone's inevitable assertion that
| the burden of verification should lie on the consumer. In
| informationally antagonistic environment, it's absurd to
| expect each individual to individually vet every service
| and product.
|
| Unfortunately, your attempt at preemption has failed.
| Only the consumer has the relevant criteria necessary to
| determine how well a given good or service fits his own
| particular needs or desires. Being rational, most other
| people intuitively use the experiences and advice of
| others as Bayesian indicators of product suitability or
| unsuitability (even if they don't know what Bayesian
| indicators are), but they're still using those external
| resources as tools with which to make their own
| decisions.
|
| > Any rational group would pool resources and have a
| single org do the research and share it with everyone.
| Oops we've reinvented a government.
|
| No, you've reinvented _Consumer Reports_. Except for the
| "single org" part, anyway -- there's no single
| determination that could be applicable to all people all
| the time, so people will naturally develop a variety of
| parallel solutions that apply different criteria to the
| evaluation process.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Do you always click in paid ads before the organic
| results? No? Oh because you personally don't prefer them?
| Oh you mean they're preferred by the minority that does
| click ads, over alternative paid ads?
|
| Gee I wonder what's wrong with that argument.
| confidantlake wrote:
| I take it you have never used the healthcare system in
| the US?
| OJFord wrote:
| > The argument is that good business spots are a limited
| community resource that it makes sense to tax, like radio
| spectrum. If you can make good use of the space you're
| taking up, go ahead, but you should compete fairly with
| other uses of the space.
|
| If it's really such a prime desirable spot then that would
| drive up the value of the land to the point that the low
| value business wouldn't have been able to afford it?
|
| I don't understand saying it's such valuable land and
| detaching that from what a business was actually able to
| pay for it.
| ufocia wrote:
| Low value is not synonymous with low profit.
|
| Also, the arguments made against car washes are the same
| as those made against bank branches which also generate
| relatively little sales tax.
|
| Anyway, if there is a surplus of car washes they will
| eventually dry up.
| a_gnostic wrote:
| Bank branches can be replaced with technology. Maybe the
| problem of car washes has a similar solution, or maybe it
| ain't a problem.
| kriops wrote:
| You can't just assert that it makes sense when answering
| why it makes sense. If you are right, then the owner is
| losing out on money by operating a car wash, which by the
| way is their moral and legal right. If you think you can
| provide more value with the same space - offer to buy it.
| Gormo wrote:
| > The argument is that good business spots are a limited
| community resource that it makes sense to tax, like radio
| spectrum.
|
| I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here. How does the
| existence of economic scarcity imply that it makes sense to
| tax anything?
|
| > If you can make good use of the space you're taking up,
| go ahead, but you should compete fairly with other uses of
| the space.
|
| But that's already inherent in the nature of scarcity --
| the more demand there is for a scarce resource, the higher
| the price is. So businesses making use of high-value prime
| real estate are already paying more for it. The law of
| supply and demand already does what you are proposing. How
| does paying additional fees to a separate institution with
| its own perverse incentives add anything to the equation?
|
| > the largely automated facility wasn't the best use for a
| prominent Main Street site
|
| This was the personal opinion of a local bureaucrat who
| thought his personal opinion should be policy. That's why
| the company is suing.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| The theory of (LVT) land value tax is that it _replaces_
| other taxes. LVT has less or no dead weight loss so it 's a
| more efficient tax.
|
| > If there's a loophole such as lack of sales tax for car
| washes, fix that, but let the playing field remain even.
|
| My claim is that the playing field is not currently even
| rather it is massively in favor for low-capital, low-labor,
| and low-regulatory businesses (like car washes) and
| additionally incentives ostensibly designed to encourage real
| estate development (1031 like-kind, treatment of real estate
| as depreciating, etc.) are now primarily used to either
| speculate on existing real estate or build the minimum to
| gain ownership/interest in speculation. If you take all the
| cash you have, you can only buy a finite amount of land. If
| you build a low-capital but profitable business like a car
| wash, you are only limited by the leverage limits imposed by
| lenders.
|
| > If desirable high value businesses aren't able to compete
| with car washes, isn't that the market doing it's thing? >
| but what are the 2nd and 3rd order effects of such a change?
|
| Tautology yes, as desired no. Technically yes because the
| market is shifting towards low-capital and low-regulatory
| businesses because they have a more predictable ROI. The goal
| isn't to disfavor the more capital & regular intensive
| businesses just regulate them. i.e the influx of car washes
| is the undesired 2nd order effect of some other policy e.g.
| minimum parking for restaurants and apartments (likely no
| such rule exists for car washes so now you need less land a
| car wash vs a restaurant).
|
| Raising regular property taxes (land+improvements) is just
| easier solution than waiting for far-reaching tax reform like
| LVT. IMO it's better to correct the market even if it means
| raising taxes overall in the short term.
| presentation wrote:
| I like Georgism but if business taxes were replaced would
| internet businesses that don't need a physical location
| thereby pay much less taxes than those that do have need
| for physical location? That does sound kinda lopsided,
| unless we're also doing a land value tax on prime domain
| name real estate.
| eppp wrote:
| Internet businesses have physical locations somewhere.
| Even if they are drop shipping than someone else is
| paying the land value tax for the warehouses they are
| shipping from. The land use exists somewhere at some
| level of the value chain and that somewhere would then be
| taxed.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Somehow the idea of perpetually paying property taxes and
| land value taxes doesn't sound appealing to me, especially
| since businesses already pay taxes.
|
| And it doesn't sound appealing to me, as an individual. I
| don't want to feel like a peasant constantly paying a tax to
| the monarch/state: so at very least the first property an
| individual owns should be tax free (not annual land value tax
| / property tax). I happen to live in a country where that's
| the case (but it's not the reason I moved there): no yearly
| property tax.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > I don't want to feel like a peasant constantly paying a
| tax to the monarch/state
|
| If you're not paying your dues, why do you think the state
| should have an obligation to protect you and your property?
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| 1. You're assuming they're not paying other types of
| taxes.
|
| 2. That's what states are _for._
| ufocia wrote:
| The days of merely protecting one's property are long
| over. At least in the US real estate taxes pay for many
| services unrelated to safety of the property. For
| example, closing a real estate tax funded senior center
| is unlikely to result in an increase in crime. Maybe the
| seniors themselves would be more vulnerable without a
| senior center, but I fail to see a general crime spree
| resulting. If anything the seniors would be watching
| other people's property and call the cops at any sign of
| potentially suspicious activity.
| Tagbert wrote:
| I live in a US state where I do pay property taxes but
| there is no income tax. Those property taxes and the
| overall sales tax are the main sources of revenue for the
| state.
|
| I don't expect to live in an area without paying something
| to maintain it.
| Arainach wrote:
| >Somehow the idea of perpetually paying property taxes and
| land value taxes doesn't sound appealing to me
|
| Eternal wealth to those lucky enough to have been born and
| bought in the past or born to families who bought in the past
| sounds plenty dystopian to me; pay up regularly or let
| someone else who will contribute to society step in.
| chrischen wrote:
| Exactly this. We all would love to be perpetual rent-
| seekers but it just doesn't work for a proper society. Not
| to mention land is a finite resource.
| ufocia wrote:
| It's less about land availability. There is plenty of
| land at least in some countries. It's more about
| desirability. As those in the real estate trade like to
| say it's all about "location, location, location."
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Which conflates "contribution to society" with "economic
| value."
| Arainach wrote:
| Paying taxes is literally contributing to society. Owning
| land is not.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Taking up land is an externality, it's not something that can
| be solved with a supply/demand curve. So, we tax it to
| encourage efficiency since our usual method if encouraging
| efficiency doesn't work.
| Gormo wrote:
| > If there's a loophole such as lack of sales tax for car
| washes, fix that, but let the playing field remain even.
|
| What is even the problem here that needs to be fixed? People
| have found a business model that is able to generate value
| from low-cost land that might otherwise lie vacant. Great,
| more power to them.
|
| The idea that people's use of their own property should
| restricted or manipulated so the government can maximize tax
| revenue is the epitome of the tail wagging the dog.
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't understand myself how LVT wouldn't result in what you
| see in many "high value" city centers (where business rents
| are insanely high) - miles and miles of law offices and
| banks, and not much else.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Land value tax is turning out to be this year's universal basic
| income.
| mindslight wrote:
| When the wish for a positive solution doesn't pan out, people
| turn to the spiteful negative. Turn up the pain on others,
| that will solve things. Never mind that many real estate tax
| regimes already include a component based on the land value.
| Presumably to LVT enthusiasts those just aren't high enough.
| When the right level of pain has created the perfect
| incentives, wasteful duplexes will vanish and high density
| arcologies will spring forth out of the ground!
|
| The real root of the problem was touched upon by the OP - the
| past two plus decades of ridiculously low interest rates as
| set by the Fed in support of one talking-head crisis or
| another. Borrowed money can only be invested in things
| banksters can understand, which given their limited
| imaginations is chiefly single family beige spec homes.
| ufocia wrote:
| Not just bankers. REITs also don't invest in groundbreaking
| endeavors, or do they?
| Gormo wrote:
| > Never mind that many real estate tax regimes already
| include a component based on the land value.
|
| It's strange, because almost _all_ property tax systems in
| the US are based on ad valorem taxation.
|
| I'm personally opposed to the concept as a matter of
| fundamental principle. Society can't function if people's
| property rights are constantly under the threat of being
| usurped by someone whose intended uses might generate more
| tax revenue for the state. People should have a right to
| use the property they own in the way that generates maximum
| value _for them_ -- that 's the point of property
| ownership. It's also why real-world ad valorem tax regimes
| usually include homestead exemptions or something similar.
|
| Some of these LVT proposals amount to just turning the
| whole of society into a tax farm, and suppressing all
| variation and outlier use cases in the name of maximizing
| tax revenue. Georgism is fundamentally flawed in its
| precepts, and would result in a rent-seeking political
| state acting as a monopolist landlord.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > The real business of car washes is real estate.
|
| Is there any evidence of this? Companies like Mister Carwash
| lease nearly all their properties and when they purchase plots
| seem to alway try to do a sale and lease. Their latest results
| claim they run 436 sites and lease 427:
|
| https://ir.mistercarwash.com/news-events/press-releases/deta...
| zharknado wrote:
| Extra Space Storage will buy your self-storage outfit for
| cash, or give you " operating partnership units in Extra
| Space Storage's REIT [Real Estate Investment Trust]."
|
| $5B in closed transactions in the last 5 years.
|
| https://www.extraspace.com/acquisition/
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| That explains why there's half a dozen self storage
| buildings within 5 feet of my apartment.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| >The real business of car washes is real estate.
|
| What I see in both car washes and the storage business
| suggested by one of the child posters is low-labor cash flow.
| I can't speak for all geographies, but locally what I observe
| is car washes are built on low-value land where these new
| heavily automated car washes have got to be a cash cow once
| they are paid off, especially with monthly subscriptions. I
| do unfortunately see a lot of storages built on what could be
| much higher value land, which does cause me to wonder what
| kind of financial engineering I'm not seeing on the surface.
| fergie wrote:
| Probably Mister Carwash (the franchise organisation) is
| leasing out locations to its franchisees, in which case the
| whole business is absolutely about real-estate.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Except they don't do franchises and the financial statement
| says they're paying rent not receiving it.
|
| https://ir.mistercarwash.com/company-information/faq
| pyrale wrote:
| Who are they renting from, though?
|
| A company I previously worked for did rent 4-5 office
| buildings at ripoff prices, to a company belonging to one
| of the board members.
| ufocia wrote:
| Maybe REITs?
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| > for a depreciating asset.
|
| I don't see a correlatiopn between depreciation and the
| cleaning of the asset. My body for example started to
| depreciate after it was appr. 30 years old, but I still wash it
| every day. I think cleaning is an operational expense that does
| not support the lifespan of the object, it merely maintains an
| experience threshold.
|
| And about experience, I also never washed my car until I got
| kids: car washes are an experience in its own right nowadays.
| ufocia wrote:
| Lifespan is a factor in depreciation, not the other way
| around, although many people believe it is, i.e. depreciated
| equipment may still have usefulness though some people
| (businesses) rush to replace equipment once it's depreciated.
|
| In case of real estate, depreciation offers income tax
| deferral because real estate retains much of its value and
| sometimes even appreciates despite being fully depreciated.
| It may be a part of or analogous to the borrow and die scheme
| of tax avoidance.
| timwaagh wrote:
| I think this is just pushing so called georgist ideology
| literally nothing else.
| a_gnostic wrote:
| > another instance of how low property taxes and the absence of
| land value taxes massively benefits low-value businesses.
|
| How are other businesses excluded from low property taxes? This
| is clearly unfair, and could be easier addressed by removing
| barriers instead of erecting new ones.
| closeparen wrote:
| The other explanation for the mysterious presence of sprawling
| low-value business premises in extremely high demand
| neighborhoods is that planners zone for them explicitly to take
| up space so yuppies can't have it.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I don't think Brown Bear Car wash is taking a loss on $20
| automated car washes. Also, Seattle has a rule in place that we
| can't wash our cars at home, so we have to go to an automated
| or DIY manual car wash if we want to wash our cars are all,
| making the business an essential here.
|
| If they someday redevelop the car washes, they will just be
| replaced with a tall building that has a car wash on the first
| floor, well, when all cars are electric that will be feasible.
| godelski wrote:
| How does an article like this not mention that if you rent you
| probably don't have a water spigot and area you can wash your own
| car. I'm not saying this is causal, but it seems like a
| reasonable question that I'd want addressed. Is it related?
| Bloomberg has not previously been shy about discussing the
| decreasing rate of home ownership and renting.
| lolinder wrote:
| What decreasing rate of home ownership? Nationwide the rate was
| only ever higher during the housing bubble [0], and the Midwest
| specifically (which is where this town is located) tends to
| have the highest affordability in the country [1].
|
| There are certain areas in the country that are struggling with
| low housing affordability and high rates of renters, but that
| can't explain excess car washes in the Midwest.
|
| [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp...
| hansvm wrote:
| Actually, why don't apartments offer a spigot and outlet
| somewhere nearby where you can park a car?
|
| In my mind, it's kind of like how above $20/hr or so (and >=
| 5ish employees), it's a no-brainer for businesses to pay for
| lunch. It's more cost effective for the business to pay, and it
| results in less dead time and more camaraderie. The experience
| of automatic or manual car washes is bad; your car doesn't get
| that clean; it's shockingly expensive for what you get; you
| don't have the proper tools/time to clean the interior or wax
| and dry the outside; you have a variety of quickly deprecating
| fake-currency scams (where the unit costs are a prime number
| not dividing the amounts you're allowed to use to pay for the
| fake currency, and the fake coins only sometimes work in the
| machines and are replaced every 2yrs or so to deprecate
| anything you may have bought in the past); and so on.
|
| Like, I average $5/mo or so cleaning the cars in my household.
| Doing it at my apartment with my own tools would be a strictly
| better experience. Most tenants I've talked to agree. In our
| complex, that's a (ballpark) >=$12k/yr opportunity. Is it that
| expensive to place a spigot and outlet close to a private road?
| Have bad actors made this infeasible? What actually keeps
| landlords from providing that amenity?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| When I lived in an apartment the complex had two dedicated
| car wash spots. This was close to 25 years ago but my guess
| is they still do.
| hansvm wrote:
| I've never toured nor rented a place with dedicated car
| wash spots. Clearly my experience isn't universal, but I'd
| love that opportunity.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Because people would come from outside and drink/bathe from
| it. Apartment car garages in California always have wanderers
| within or nearby
| godelski wrote:
| I guess technically I have had a spigot in some apartments
| I've been in. But I'd need like a 200 ft hose to reach my car
| and I'm not sure how I'd wash it without getting every other
| car wet and block all my neighbors while doing so. But other
| than that, I guess I totally could have been a main character
| and cleaned my car "at home."
| dbrueck wrote:
| I wash my car annually, whether it needs it or not!
| resolutebat wrote:
| How can car washes in the US still go for $10 in these
| inflationary times, or a fraction of that with a subscription?
| Here in Australia you're generally looking at A$25 and up
| ($17-ish at current exchange rates, more until recently).
| bombcar wrote:
| Because after paying for the equipment and maintenance, the
| marginal cost of the wash is whatever soap it uses, the
| electricity, and a few gallons of water (with a recycling car
| wash).
|
| Selling a teaspoon of soap and 4 gallons of water for $10 is a
| darn good deal. And if you're already paying all the fixed
| costs, you want to sell as many as you can.
| Animats wrote:
| In the UK, it's a common immigration scam.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/crime/nine-
| people-...
| Lammy wrote:
| > Such "destination" facilities can offer [...] electric vehicle
| charging
|
| This seems like the most likely reason to me. It's a way to hold
| on to land in a way that normalizes gas-station-like traffic
| patterns without the "gas station" stigma. They can be easily
| converted in the future once electric cars are a large enough
| percentage of cars that everyone will come to accept fueling as a
| 30-minute activity instead of a 30-second activity. If they tried
| to just buy land and keep it empty they would have a hell of a
| time convincing NIMBY types to tolerate the introduction of
| charger traffic patterns where none existed in the meantime.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| IDK, I used to drive all over the Phoenix valley pre-covid in
| my cab and most of new business construction I would see was
| either a car wash or coffee shop. I was messing around on
| google maps one day and there was something crazy like seven
| starbucks within reasonable walking distance of my apartment
| including two in the same shopping center.
|
| I always thought the car wash construction boom had something
| to do with water conservation, Phoenix being in the desert, but
| apparently not.
| Lammy wrote:
| Anecdote: I went to a Starbucks just today (in a Tesla!) that
| had a huge bank of superchargers outside and zero seating
| inside.
|
| I'm sure the beancounters love the idea of everyone using
| Starbucks as their 30-minute car-fueling-and-now-also-drinks
| stop. It solves all of the (from the corporate point of view)
| downsides of running an actual store with, like, chairs and
| shit. It practically guarantees each "seat" turns over in
| that amount of time since the act of showing up to use the
| charger implies they have somewhere else to be. Nobody's sat
| there for hours on their laptop. No problematic homeless
| houseless unhoused people shooting up in the restroom unless
| they happen to be living out of an $80000 car. Corporate wet
| dream lol
| smileysteve wrote:
| Possibly, and carwash and charging are value add to the
| consumer. If you wash your car for 5 minutes after your weekly
| 30 minute super charge, and before or after every long trip,
| you're going to have a nice looking car.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I don't know why there are suddenly so many, but I do know that a
| large majority of them are a complete waste of time and money.
| Only use a car wash if they have filtered water -or- you have
| salt on your vehicle (i.e. driving on salted winter roads).
| Paying for anything else is a large waste of money, as your car
| will still look dirty when it dries. Yes, that under spray is the
| most important part of the wash if you are driving on salted
| roads. Don't skip it.
| laughing_man wrote:
| A whole article that doesn't touch on the real reason there are
| so many car washes, laundromats, and nail salons.
|
| It's because the cars aren't the only thing being cleaned. If you
| have a lot of illicit cash that needs to wind up in your bank
| account, these are the kinds of places you need to own.
| ks2048 wrote:
| I thought part of it was that these are things that can't be
| replaced with online shopping.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Most of the new automated chains are cashless
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| This kind of thing has been around for a long time.
|
| The classic method was to build a trailer park or a drive-in
| theater. You could keep steady cash coming in until you were
| ready to build something more substantial, then simply evict the
| trailer owners (space rent was typically month-to-month) or tear
| down the movie screen and grade the parking lot flat, in both
| cases with very little demo cost.
|
| Trailer parks and drive-in theaters were both _way_ bigger than
| car washes. These guys are pikers.
| coldtea wrote:
| Perhaps inspired by a certain TV series championing science and
| working class teachers?
| devit wrote:
| According to several sources, car washes seem highly likely to
| damage the car, and are also usually unnecessary (the car works
| fine even if dirty, unless visibility is seriously impaired, and
| eventually it rains and the rain automatically washes the car if
| you park it outside).
|
| Probably a lot of people are conditioned that they need to have a
| clean car.
| sixothree wrote:
| I'm 100% convinced they also coat the car with something that
| is dust attracting.
| jen_h wrote:
| I live in Florida, where these subscription-only car washes
| proliferate like kudzu; they've crowded out the good old gas
| station stalwarts that you might or might not get stuck in for
| several years now.
|
| And the cause for their spread has been widely and publicly known
| for years: somebody found out that these things print cash. You
| own the land, you pay for one or two employees on-site max. Once
| PE woke up to the "strategy," it was game on.
|
| PE gets excited and overdoes it, wealth extraction hearkens
| enshittification, corner car washes are the new dollar store.
|
| So I almost didn't read past the subtitle, what's actually new
| here? Oh:
|
| "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."
|
| That's almost unbelievable. Twice as many as McDonalds+Starbucks!
|
| (Another concern: Who's on the hook for all the PFAS cleanups
| when the scheme goes bust? Because you know it won't be PE.)
| bombcar wrote:
| McDonalds + Starbucks is a weird connection. You'd think the
| first thing to compare them to would be number of gas stations
| ...
|
| 186,000 gas stations vs 60,000 car washes.
|
| And a quick sanity check of my town - we have more gas stations
| than car washes (though some have car washes) and way more
| burger joints than car washes, and also more coffee shops than
| car washes.
| thekevan wrote:
| Maybe they all watched Breaking Bad and think they can use it to
| launder money.
| speakfreely wrote:
| The answer is private equity "roll-up" strategies of "boring
| businesses". You're going to see this accelerate in tons of other
| things that PE thinks can be easily consolidated, the gold rush
| has already started for dental practices, primary care providers,
| coin laundry, HVAC companies, landscaping, etc.
|
| American small businesses are disappearing because that's what
| consumers want (what they vote for with their dollars, as opposed
| to what they say in polls).
| etc-hosts wrote:
| Veterinary care choices are simultaneously shrinking and
| skyrocketing in price.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Ours turned into a subscription service.
| derbOac wrote:
| I don't think it's necessarily what consumers want. Sometimes
| it's what business owners want (eg when they retire and sell),
| and consolidation gives the new owner the benefit of local
| monopoly or decreased competiton.
|
| Absolutely no one in my area likes trends in veterinary care,
| for example, but there are only so many options.
| conductr wrote:
| Have they actually increased though or just replacing the "laser
| wash" that almost every gas station uses to have and everyone
| thought was crappy. I see those mostly boarded up as out of
| service now. I definitely don't see as many full service options
| as I used to but undocumented workers in Texas are commanding the
| most pay they've ever been able to the last decade or so.
| hereme888 wrote:
| I thought it was odd to see so many pop up in my small town.
| They're really "bling" and damage the small town peaceful look.
| It's really an eye-sore and wasted space.
|
| My car washing consists of occasional use of the gas station
| scrubber.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I don't understand why we can't just let the market decide which
| businesses make sense based on their revenue vs. leasing the
| land. Presumably if car washes are so profitable it's because
| consumers want to use them, so why are we artificially
| restricting their expansion? It also provides a free subsidy to
| existing car washes who get to charge higher prices than they
| would in a competitive market. Restrictions to entering trade
| generally hurt consumers.
|
| FWIW, I've used a paid car wash <10x in my life so it doesn't
| matter that much to me.
| avidiax wrote:
| Imagine, for a moment, an even freer market.
|
| Someone opens a car wash in a central area. They self-declare a
| tax value for the land and its improvements.
|
| We also allow that anyone can forcibly buy that land by paying
| that same self-declared tax value + X%. The sale can't be
| blocked.
|
| We've ended the monopoly of land ownership, and imposed a free
| market on land purchasing.
|
| Car washes that are a waste of the land they are placed on will
| get bought out and converted to other uses. If they are not,
| they will remain.
|
| This, by the way, is very close to a land value tax, and all
| we've done is force a fair appraisal of potential value for a
| parcel, rather than the current, possibly underutilized value.
| NegativeK wrote:
| Forcing the sale of private property to anyone who can fork
| up the cash sounds absolutely ripe for abuse.
| avidiax wrote:
| Yes, real life is always more complicated.
|
| It would be necessary to block sales of a personal or
| vindictive nature, so the local rich guy can't force their
| enemies out of their homes.
|
| And have robust antitrust. And correct the perverse
| incentive towards poison pills, such as polluting the land
| to make it undesirable.
| bombcar wrote:
| Just make X% large enough.
|
| If Musk wants to get pissed at me and buy my house for
| $3m I'll be there to sell.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| They watched Breaking Bad too much :-)
| forgotpassword2 wrote:
| Will it really be like the coffee market? I don't think so. Gen Z
| has the least intent to buy properties, buy cars, how will cars
| washes sustain in the future?
| fragmede wrote:
| Is it intent or financial? If I couldn't afford something, i
| can see myself, not bothering to try.
| billforsternz wrote:
| I don't get the hostility to car washes. I've owned cars for 40
| years and I'm pretty sure I've never hand washed one once. Life's
| too short. I like and need car washes.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Henry George FTW.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Cartels laundering money.
| lencastre wrote:
| Subscription model car washing, saved you a click.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| It's not just car washes. So many small towns are just gutted by
| bank branches. Beautiful historic downtowns that used to host
| shops and restaurants, half of which are banks now.
| orojackson wrote:
| I'm surprised no one here has mentioned rinseless washes like
| Optimum No Rinse (ONR) as an option for washing your car. You
| dilute it with water in a 1:256 solution in a bucket, and then
| you use a slightly-dripping microfiber towel or a rinseless-wash-
| specific sponge to clean your car. The rinseless wash itself acts
| as its own drying aid, so you can wipe your car dry with a
| microfiber drying towel afterwards without having to rinse off
| the car (hence the term rinseless).
|
| I would say this is the cheapest, simplest, and (arguably) safest
| way to wash your car, especially if you buy the rinseless wash
| concentrate by the gallon. It's easy enough that it allows me to
| wash my car nearly every week. I only need about 3 gallons of
| water and 1.5 fluid ounces of ONR to fully wash one car.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| It's funny that in Greece we have a similar situation with take
| away coffee places. There are just too many almost on every
| corner. And to make it relevant to the article, the last couple
| years people open coffee-hybrid businesses, like barber+cafe, car
| wash+cafe, and so on. :-)
| globular-toast wrote:
| People still use automatic car washes in the US? They've almost
| completely disappeared in the UK. I've never used one in my life.
| We have hand car washes and self-service car washes instead (a
| jet wash). I thought it was well known the automatic ones ruined
| your paint work.
| icar wrote:
| Well, I remember a story about a car wash that could explain why
| someone would want to own one...
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| chemistry teachers' salary is too low?
| ufocia wrote:
| Breaking Bad made car washes a cultural icon.
|
| Perhaps people want to launder money or be as cool as
| Heisenberg/Walter White.
| bombcar wrote:
| > Unlike stores, restaurants or other businesses, most self-
| service car washes don't pay sales taxes to their host
| communities.
|
| Then why don't they? It seems a taxable event has occurred, so
| tax it?
|
| Maybe the current regulations count it as something else, so it
| has no sales tax.
| 0n0n0m0uz wrote:
| Interesting, I have had this conversation many times about
| Montrose, Colorado. There are more car washes there in terms of
| its size than any place I have ever been and there are more under
| construction.
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