"Surplus energy" economics and the decline of the automated car wash

April 10, 2019 6:58 PM

"In the early 2000s, automated car washes were a common add-on service to tens of thousands of filling stations around the UK. Today only a fraction of them survive. In their place there has been a quiet regression to a far more primitive service – tens of thousands of hand car wash services have mushroomed across the British Isles." How falling surplus energy and labour exploitation have led to an unexpected regression in technological complexity – according to Tim Watkins – and what it might mean for the future.
posted by sylvanshine (35 comments total)

I’m not sure about the falling surplus energy thesis, but you can go back to marx to find observations of instances where sophisticated technology goes unused because a fall in the cost of labor makes labor-intensive methods more profitable than capital-intensive ones. See this bit from chapter 15 of Capital (apologies for the length of the quote):

The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product is limited by the requirement that less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery. For the capitalist, however, there is a further limit on its use. Instead of paying for the labour, he pays only the value of the labour-power employed; the limit to his using a machine is therefore fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it. [...]

Hence the invention nowadays in England of machines that are employed only in North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries machines were invented in Germany for use exclusively in Holland, and just as many French inventions of the eighteenth century were exploited only in England. [...] Before the labour of women and children under 10 years old was forbidden in mines, the capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with men, so far sanctioned by their moral code, and especially by their ledgers, that it was only after the passing of the Act that they had recourse to machinery. The Yankees have invented a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of it because the ‘wretch’ who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist. In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling barges, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is beneath all calculation.

Hence we nowhere find a more shameless squandering of human labour-power for despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.

posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:21 PM on April 10, 2019 [29 favorites]

something that goes beyond marx, though, and that watkins addresses in the first link, is that as labor-intensive methods come to replace capital-intensive ones, capitalists may have to replace the control over production that they’ve established through the ownership of machines by claiming a more direct sort of control — by effectively claiming ownership over the laborers themselves.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:30 PM on April 10, 2019 [10 favorites]

one more thing before I bow out and stop marxing up the thread: if this sort of thing is interesting to you, you owe it to yourself to read chapters 13, 14, and 15 of Capital. Dude traces out the development of industrial capitalist production methods from simple cooperation to the employment of rigid division of labor to the invention and use of giant factory machines, and considers the impact of each shift on the power relations between labor and capital. It’s a tour de force, and much much more readable than the dense early chapters where he natters on about exchanging linen for coats.

And, well, he’s not given credit for it, but in my read in specifically those chapters he more or less invents the field that we now call science and technology studies. and, well, said field would be much healthier if fewer people derived their thinking from heidegger’s stuff about the hand and more people derived their thinking from marx on the types of technology that capital considers worth funding, and the impacts of those technologies when put into widespread use.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:40 PM on April 10, 2019 [25 favorites]

I hadn't thought about it before, but we are down to only one power car wash in the whole area. (Any other Gen-Xers or older who grew up in the Buffalo/Niagara area remember the two blue whale-shaped car washes that used to be in North Tonawanda and Niagara Falls?)

And the sister and I were just remembering today back when we were wee little monsters, and you'd throw the whole family in the car, fill up the tank, and go for a long drive with no destination in mind, just for the fun of it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:16 PM on April 10, 2019 [1 favorite]

I read the article and a few others on the site. The guy seems to have one idea and is desperately trying to fit every single fact about the world into that idea. Like, maybe the automated car washers fell out of favor because they are expensive and prone to failure and not as good as initially promised? That happens a lot with automation efforts; and sometimes you just have to come back and try again with a new solution, or wait for better tech to come along. Or it could be a half dozen other hot takes that would be easy to reel off and would have just as much support as his oil-extraction-ratio theory.

And his other articles are just wrong. E.g. in
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2019/03/06/the-green-deal-is-hopium/
- He approvingly quotes from two different sources about the current renewable energy mix; one says that renewables provide 11% of total energy supply, the other says that renewables provide 1.5% of total energy supply. These two quotes are within a page of each other, and he doesn't seem to notice the problem, and in fact uses the second quote to show how deluded most people are about the progress of renewable energy. Also, even the 11% quote seems to be on the low side from my 5 minutes of googling.
- He approvingly quotes from a conservative think tanker who claims that it's simply impossible to convert to renewable energy using current and near future technologies.
- he writes this sentence: "The Democrat Party version of the green new deal is little more than a debt-based job-creation and public healthcare scheme with some windmills and solar panels providing a veneer of greenwash. " Which is just wrong on several levels, but most obviously in that he doesn't even know the names of our political parties.

In short he seems threatened by anything that might lead him out of the box of oilism and collapse via energy resource depletion. It's not clear that he has anything useful to say about energy.

But! As RNTP shows, there are interesting things to say when it comes to how automation and the cost of labor interact. There was a podcast where they interviewed Peter Frase, the guy who wrote the "Four Futures" article for Jacobin. He mentions that there is this argument made against unions, increased minimum wage, etc. that if we improve things for workers and make their labor more expensive, then that will just be an impetus for replacing the workers with machines! And Frase's response is basically "good, that's how we get to gay space communism, by making automation as attractive as possible". We should go to any lengths to prevent people from having to work. Which as a lazy programmer made a lot of intuitive sense to me.
posted by Balna Watya at 8:25 PM on April 10, 2019 [13 favorites]

I'm not convinced how relevant the energy surplus argument is either. I suspect that what it comes down to is a combination of factors, but most importantly the concentration of filling station ownership and the closure of many stations. This is something that has has happened in Australia, too. Previously, filling station owners competed against other local filling stations for business - I still remember one opening when I was a kid: they had a searchlight advertising it, and handed out cartoon stickers to the children of customers. Automatic car washes were cool, and attracted customers for that reason alone. Now, with so many closures, the major factor in customer decisions is convenience: how far will I have to drive to get to the filling station? This helps explain why the remaining filling stations offer many more snack foods and groceries than they once did: it can be worth taking a longer trip for fuel if it saves you time overall.

Car washes aren't a great way of attracting custom nowadays. Most people don't wash their car very often, and they're not going to drive to a distant filling station just because they washed their car there last week. Also, I feel that cars don't get as dirty nowadays? I'm not sure why, maybe it's the fall in insect populations, or better paint. Automatic car washes take a lot of room and capital expenditure. They don't size well if you need to expand them, either. In contract, it's easy to expand a manual car wash: just hire more staff and buy a few more buckets. So, even if a business adds a car wash, it will probably be manual. Most sites couldn't fit an automatic car wash in even if they wanted to, not without closing their cafe/mini-market - which are far more reliable ways of attracting business. So there's not much reason to have a car wash at all, and installing an automatic car wash is super expensive. It's easy to see why there aren't many automatic washes nowadays, even without appealing to general impoverishment.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:47 PM on April 10, 2019 [7 favorites]

"Hand car wash syndrome" is a genuine puzzle, where economists disagree about the causes.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:49 PM on April 10, 2019 [1 favorite]

Economics and the art of car maintenance - "What washing cars can teach us about different types of capitalism."

While living in New York, in about 2005, I once discussed the contrasts between the US and Norwegian economists over lunch with a visiting Norwegian economist. We hit upon having your car cleaned as an everyday activity that captured an important difference. In many places in the US, you hardly slow down before a team of two or three workers descend on you with detergent, cloths and polish, and proceed to rub down your car. In Norway, as my interlocutor put it, “that’s a technology that went out of use in the 1960s”. In the ensuing decades, your only option was to watch a garage-sized machine spray detergent on the windscreen while three huge blue spinning brush rollers moved along the sides and roof — or clean the car yourself.

Car wash by mechanised service or by manual labour: this simple transaction crystallises two distinct varieties of capitalism. Understanding why they are so different teaches us much about how each has changed, and what it takes to change any market economy for the better rather than for the worse. Every time something is done by humans that could be done by machines — in particular something that elsewhere is done by machines — we should stop and ask why. That’s because using human labour unnecessarily is a missed opportunity for greater prosperity. As a matter of definition, the more labour goes into producing a particular good or rendering a particular service, the lower the productivity of each hour’s work in that activity, and it is ultimately only from greater labour productivity that higher incomes can be paid.

[...]

For a very long time, it has been the conventional wisdom that inequality is the price you pay for faster growth and that high wages discourage investment and productivity. These views went a long way to legitimise the rise in inequality and the decline of unions in many western countries. But the car wash story captures a particular kind of capitalism that from a conventional view should be impossible: where greater equality leads to growth, greater productivity and therefore higher incomes overall. It is a living example of the Nordic model.

The northernmost European countries are well known for pulling off both prosperity and egalitarianism, giving the lie to the claim that inequality is the price to pay for growth. Instead, a compressed wage structure has been good for productivity. The high cost of unproductive manual work and relatively cheap high-skilled labour both make companies accelerate investment and adopt new technologies quickly. In such a form of capitalism, all those who would otherwise be cleaning cars can do other, more productive jobs. That, of course, requires the right policies — which in the Nordic countries have involved strong aggregate demand management, good provision of education and measures to protect workers rather than jobs, making it easy for them to switch between activities and industries.

There is a coda to the story about the car wash. Around the time I had that lunch chat, manual car washes began appearing in Norway again. Suddenly it became possible to have your car cleaned by hand — to be precise, by the hands of immigrant workers — and, at times, at a cut-rate price. It goes to show that it is possible to regress from a high-productivity, high-wage labour market to a low-productivity, low-wage one if policymakers do not watch out.

In economic policy, you get what you pay for - "Public spending works wonders for skills and labour markets."

I wrote how the difference in car washes between economies — do providers automate or offer hand washes? — reflects two varieties of capitalism. One encourages business models that make intensive use of low-productivity and low-paid labour; the other is based on higher wages but invests more in labour-saving capital.

Achieving growth by shedding jobs based on cheap labour offers the promise of wage and productivity growth. But it also poses the question at the heart of the economic changes in the west over the past four decades (and the decades to come): what happens to those workers whose tasks are eliminated? Lifting the lower end of the pay scale does not help someone who is left without work. But look at the Nordic experience, and you will see that work participation has not, on the whole, been held back by the quick uptake of labour-saving technology.

Why is this? Aside from wage equality encouraging automation, there are two more ingredients to the Nordic secret sauce that explain how the model works.

The first is a history of aggressive aggregate demand management in macroeconomic policy. Wage egalitarianism changes the composition of jobs in the economy — towards more capital-intensive, high-productivity tasks on average — but the total number of those jobs depends on the overall demand in the economy. If macroeconomic policy tools such as government budget balances and central banking interest rates are used aggressively enough, sufficient new and better jobs can be created to offset all the low-productivity jobs that are lost because wages are too high to employ people for them. Scandinavia has historically used these tools well. Many countries could do a much better job. There is no shortage of policy instruments — even in today’s unprecedented era of high public debt and very low interest rates — only a lack of boldness by policymakers in using the ammunition they have to push aggregate demand higher.

But, second, such a policy of aggressive job creation can only work if workers are equipped to fill the new and more productive roles. That requires two things: workers must be able and willing to perform the new jobs, and the labour market must smooth as much as possible workers’ move from one job to another as low-productivity roles become obsolete... the Nordic labour markets are characterised by what Denmark calls “flexicurity” — flexible rules for hiring and firing, but with policies and institutions in place to improve the chances of getting a new job. In Sweden, for example, employers’ organisations are held responsible for worker reallocation schemes to find new jobs for workers who are let go. Denmark has by far the highest rate of public spending on “active labour market policies” among rich economies: the government spends about 2 per cent of national income on helping workers find new jobs, mostly on training and on creating sheltered or supported job opportunities or rehabilitating workers. Sweden and Finland come in next with about half as much; the US spends a meagre 0.11 per cent. As a result, Swedes, Danes and Finns move between jobs more often than almost all other European workers, with almost a quarter of them shifting every year...

Anyone who sees the Nordic experience as a model must accept that it is hard to replicate the institutional set-up and cultural attitudes that have favoured high and egalitarian wages there. But the other two elements of the model — high skills levels and easy flows between jobs — should be easier to implement. The countries that have achieved these goals are those that have chosen to devote resources to it. Other countries can direct their resources the same way, and expect similar results, if they just prioritise accordingly.

posted by kliuless at 11:43 PM on April 10, 2019 [9 favorites]

Horrifically, some hand car washes in the UK are practising modern slavery.
posted by atlantica at 12:06 AM on April 11, 2019 [4 favorites]

Automated washes scratch the top coat like crazy. In theory, at least, a hand car wash should deliver a better result. (At first glance, everyone's assuming that automated and manual have the same outcome).
posted by Leon at 1:36 AM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

Horrifically, some hand car washes in the UK are practising modern slavery.

Quite a few of them are laundering drug money as well, at least in my area.


Automated washes scratch the top coat like crazy. In theory, at least, a hand car wash should deliver a better result

In practice, it'll likely be worse. It's typically the same buckets and sponges as the last car, it's often on unpaved or poorly placed ground, and those sponges get dropped, then cleaned... in that same bucket.

This will vary from place to place, and you could make an effort and do it properly, but these are usually cut-all-the-corners operations, I the end result is bits of gravel and other muck being scraped across your paint.
posted by Dysk at 3:02 AM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

He approvingly quotes from two different sources about the current renewable energy mix; one says that renewables provide 11% of total energy supply, the other says that renewables provide 1.5% of total energy supply. These two quotes are within a page of each other, and he doesn't seem to notice the problem, and in fact uses the second quote to show how deluded most people are about the progress of renewable energy. Also, even the 11% quote seems to be on the low side from my 5 minutes of googling.

I don't really know anything about the guy, but you're misreading him here. He makes it clear that the 11% includes wood burning ("something that has a higher pollution footprint than coal"). The second figure, 1.5%, includes only what he calls "modern renewables" (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and ocean energy). There's no contradiction in this. He is highlighting the difference between the two figures and explaining why it exists.
posted by cincinnatus c at 3:23 AM on April 11, 2019 [5 favorites]

We didn't have a car when I was growing up and my biggest regret about the absence was that meant we couldn't go through an automated car wash. I still get mildly excited about going to clean the car now. I was slightly put out last week when my SO said the car needed cleaning and then went and did it herself.
posted by biffa at 3:34 AM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

Over 50 years ago, I worked at a hand-washing car wash. I was a kid, and the last one called when they needed people. If the weather was bad, or even looked like rain, they closed. Not a steady job. Today, that building is an automated wash, run by one or two people. Does a good job, and the cost has not kept up with inflation, at all. There are a lot fewer car washes around than there used to be. I think it's clean water regulations that have had the most impact. What's still a going thing is self-serve washes, where you pay a machine and then spray and scrub your own car.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:56 AM on April 11, 2019

Following Cincinnatus comment: The 1.5% figure is based on Total Primary Energy Supply figures from the IEA. Basically about 225000ktoe out of total 14,000,000ktoe. The 11% figure is achieved by adding biomass (1,350,000ktoe) to the number above. A lot of that biomass will be small-scale combustion for cooking, heating and light by people with limited alternatives. There is a growing move to larger scale combustion in thermal plants plus lots of use for biofuel in that figure.

TPES is a little misleading since it includes all the energy that is vented to atmosphere in FF combustion (ie the majority of it), since RES-Electricity doesn't largely vent anything it means its share looks smaller than it actually is in terms of meeting demand. TPES is likely to go down if RE replaces FF in volume.
posted by biffa at 4:02 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the correction Cincinnatus and the really neat resource Biffa. I had a couple of problems; not distinguishing between electricity generation and TPES, and not realizing that his list of "modern renewables" did not include hydro power.
posted by Balna Watya at 4:42 AM on April 11, 2019

I'm assuming that these hand car washes different from self-serve car washes.

Most car washes around here are bays where you throw a couple dollars into a machine in exchange for getting time on a pressure washer with an integrated soap/wax dispenser. From a capital standpoint, it's probably simpler and less expensive to maintain than a fully-automated car wash, and most of the labor (and liability for scratches, etc) gets offloaded to the consumer.

It's weird that these car washes wouldn't have just reverted to a similar self-serve variety, and I think it's even sinister that this economic regression is passing up a presumably more optimal service model (for capital, at least) in order to make use of a setup where labor can be more easily exploited.

Why employ people to hand wash cars when you could just let the customer do it themselves like so many other pay-for-the-privilege-of-doing-it-yourself services?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:24 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

kliuless mentioned Scandinavian wage compression. If you want to read more about how wage compression - i.e. raise the lowest wages and lower the highest wages - leads to a higher-productivity economy, The Scandinavian Model and Economic Development [pdf] is a good read.

The negative side effect of wage compression was increased profits to capital, with the result that a vast proportion of capital in the Swedish economy was controlled by a mere fifteen families (previously).

And the other negative result was that many low-productivity jobs were simply outsourced from Sweden, like Ikea's use of slave labour in East Germany.

However, the negative results are shared by the U.K.'s system, without the positive results of higher minimum wages and higher productivity. Near-slaves washing cars by hand in a rich, highly-developed economy is a disgrace and an injustice.
posted by clawsoon at 6:01 AM on April 11, 2019 [4 favorites]

I followed a few of the links, but I haven't seen any surplus energy numbers so far, just "it's getting worse." Can anyone point me to actual numbers? What are the energy costs of energy extraction, and how have they changed over time?
posted by clawsoon at 6:05 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Automated washes scratch the top coat like crazy. In theory, at least, a hand car wash should deliver a better result


I haven't seen a car wash with brushes in ages; they all just use jets of high-pressure water now. Likewise, I've only ever seen hand car washes in California, they all seem to be either automated or self-service here in PA. Probably because of the lack of cheap immigrant labor here.
posted by octothorpe at 6:27 AM on April 11, 2019

I’m not sure about the falling surplus energy thesis, but you can go back to marx to find observations of instances where sophisticated technology goes unused because a fall in the cost of labor makes labor-intensive methods more profitable than capital-intensive ones.

So this guy (Tim Watkins) appears to have written an actual book on his Energy Theory of Value which seems to build on Marx by expanding the LToV. On the one hand that seems like a great idea which probably makes a lot sense, on the other hand the blog is a bit rambly and I'm not sure I want to read a book length version of it.
posted by atrazine at 6:30 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

A short article from 2012 with some energy surplus numbers:

"Back in the 1920's, oil was paying off at 100-to-1," said Zencey. "It took one barrel of oil to extract, process, refine, ship and deliver 100 barrels of oil. That's a phenomenal rate of return. If you work out the percentage, that's a 10,000 percent rate of return." But that's not the rate of return today. Now, conventional oil production worldwide pays off at about a 20-to-1 ratio. And in Canada, where the oil comes from tar sands, it's closer to 5-to-1. "Renewable energy sources are paying off at higher rates, 12-to-1, 15-to-1, 17-to-1. That tells you right there, hmmmm, the age of oil should be over." A few problems with that though… Calculating these figures is complicated and estimates fluctuate. One researcher I spoke with, Carey King at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, said he can look at the same wind farm and calculate a payoff of 20-to-1 or 4-to-1. He can also make the numbers dance for oil too, by the way.

posted by clawsoon at 6:32 AM on April 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

I haven't seen a car wash with brushes in ages; they all just use jets of high-pressure water now.

And those are fine for rinsing the salt from your car during a winter melt, but in general do somewhere between a quarter-assed and third-assed job.

they all seem to be either automated or self-service here in PA. Probably because of the lack of cheap immigrant labor here

Also the fraction of the year when hand-washing would put you at nontrivial risk of hypothermia and death is minimal in (populated) California.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:12 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

And those are fine for rinsing the salt from your car during a winter melt, but in general do somewhere between a quarter-assed and third-assed job.

I literally only ever wash my car in the Spring right after the last threat of snow is gone so that I can wash the salt off. It's ten years old and the paint looks new and there's not a spot of rust so the lack of washing doesn't seem to have harmed it.
posted by octothorpe at 7:19 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure about service station car washes, but where live stand-alone automated car washes (with some employees) dominate true DIY car washes. If I had to guess, I'd say land price imbalances, the gas station version of an automated car wash doesn't work well (ie: produce results people like), high maintenance costs, and people don't like dealing with convenience store employees/kiosks as more applicable reasons for the rise of stand-alone automated car washes than anything having to do with energy policy.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:35 AM on April 11, 2019

I have no knowledge about any of the economic arguments in the story or comments. But I'm truly surprised that this isn't mentioned anywhere: I go to hand car washes instead of automated ones because automated car washes only wash the outside. Hand car washes vacuum the inside and clean the dash and inside windows. In the hierarchy of priorities, i care much more about the the state of the car's inside (where I am) than the outside. I bet I'm not only person who prefers hand car washes simply because i want the inside clean and I'm too lazy to do it myself.
posted by jon574 at 8:20 AM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

I find it really hard to believe the cost of energy inputs is driving car washes out of business.

This guy’s theory strikes me as a bunch of overly bold proclamations supported by furious hand waving.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 8:51 AM on April 11, 2019

I hope there aren't any to begin with, but this issue makes me wonder if future humans will look back on us as Atlanteans. Ancient civilization full of magical technology and wonder, but collapses suddenly and the all the tech we have will be but myths to them and they won't understand how we/they lost it all.
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:05 AM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a behind-the-scenes conglomerate nibbling at the profits of automated car washes. Buy up all the parts and supply chain, raise the prices, and leave the owners with no alternatives. There can't be that many suppliers of giant roller brushes, car-sized spray nozzles, or 8-foot-wide blow dryers.

On the other hand, buckets and sponges and regular ol' hoses will remain cheap.
posted by explosion at 9:27 AM on April 11, 2019

Horrifically, some hand car washes in the UK are practising modern slavery.

Quite a few of them are laundering drug money as well, at least in my area.

Brexiting Bad.
posted by srboisvert at 9:55 AM on April 11, 2019

I find it really hard to believe the cost of energy inputs is driving car washes out of business.

Not only that, if the things did legitimately good business, at least in the US, every superstore with a mega parking lot would have one. Is there anything inherent about a gas station that also equals car wash?
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:49 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

I hope there aren't any to begin with, but this issue makes me wonder if future humans will look back on us as Atlanteans. Ancient civilization full of magical technology and wonder, but collapses suddenly and the all the tech we have will be but myths to them and they won't understand how we/they lost it all.

reminds me of A Canticle for Leibowitz
posted by some loser at 11:49 AM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

I can't think of a human-powered carwash in Minnesota. At best you sometimes see one set up as a fundraiser by some high school group. I understand this is discussing the exotic and strange United Kingdom. I'm surprised things are that different there.

I haven't seen a car wash with brushes in ages; they all just use jets of high-pressure water now.

The place I very occasionally get a car wash is a gas station chain. They have a touch-free (half-assed water squirty) and "light-touch" (giant rotating brushes) bay and you decide when you drive in which one you use.

Is there anything inherent about a gas station that also equals car wash?

As Yogi Berra may not have said, "nothing propinks like propinquity." I think that people see it as a time-saver to get the car washed when they're already doing something else with the car, whether or not that is actually the case.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 11:59 AM on April 11, 2019

There are several hand car washes in a nearby town that is poor and majority black. I used to live there and I still go back there now and then to have my car cleaned, because they also clean the INSIDE of the car. When I clean the inside of the car myself, I always end up with streaks on the windows and the plastic panels look dull or mottled. I don't know what the secret sauce is at the hand car wash but they get it done better than I can.

The place I go to does a nice job and the guys (all men and all black) who work there seem happy. I tip them well. I hope they are not enslaved. My impression is that this place tolerates employees who drift in and out. There's music and the workers are always chattering and laughing together, with extra guys hanging out there and not working, just visting. Maybe they pay under the table. Maybe there is a bottle going around behind the scenes somewhere. A lot of gossip definitely happens there. But I wouldn't dream of asking nosy questions.

The place is not always open - they seem to be pretty casual about their opening hours. I just try back later.

You could accuse me of being a middle class white chick who is slumming over there. But I think they value my business and don't mind me showing up.

There's an automatic car wash on the next block. But the hand car wash is more of a happening place.
posted by elizilla at 1:37 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

There are two automated car washes near me and one of the nearby grocery stores has an underground auto-detailing setup where people will nicely clean your car, inside and out, for $100+ while you're doing your shopping. I have joined up with some friends to get a car wash card that lets you get one car wash every day. In the 6-7 months we've been doing it I've used it once because as it turns out I really don't care about washing my car.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:49 PM on April 11, 2019 [1 favorite]