Why Are There So Many Car Washes Now?

I live in what I’d call a “sleepy” Texas town; we boast a few thousand residents, we celebrate the arrival of every new fast food chain as a sign of civilization, and nothing big ever really happens. So why do we need six car washes? Why did we need to build four new facilities this year?

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And it’s not just in my little town, either; on the five-minute drive from a highway exit to my mom’s house, you’ll pass no fewer than four car washes, all within the same half-mile stretch of road. If you keep driving past the turn-in to her subdivision, you’ll find two more before the next traffic light.

And I’m not the only one who’s noticed this influx; local news stations from Treasure Valley, Idaho; South Carolina; central Arkansas; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Tampa, Florida, are all asking the same question: what’s up with all these car washes?

I posed my car wash conundrum on Twitter (or the site now doing business as X), and several people hopped in with their own observations and explanations. The simplest answer was that, as primarily cash business, car washes are perfect for laundering money. Others said it was a great way to have a business without really needing many employees, giving them low operating costs compared to other businesses. There was also one guy who really limbered up for a big stretch, claiming that kids these days don’t take pride in hand washing their cars, so they go to drive-thru car washes instead.

In digging for answers, I found a lot of other explanations, many of which didn’t quite hit home. Sure, maybe a Midwest city needs an influx of car washes thanks to the mud, dirt, and road salt of the winter months, but that’s not even a minor concern here in Texas. Many cities lack public transportation, but a city that doesn’t currently have a bus service likely didn’t have one before, so there wouldn’t be a sudden influx of cars to explain a rising demand for car washes.

Finally, I found some explanations that actually made sense.

Car Wash Memberships

These days, many automatic, drive-thru car washes run off a subscription business model. Every month, you pay a set fee, for which you purchase access to a certain number (or an unlimited amount) of car washes. That has actually created a much more stable business model, one where people are frequenting car washes no matter the time of year.

In Tampa, a traffic analyst found local car wash owners admit that the influx of automated, subscription-based car wash services result in “easier money, especially if they get folks on a membership. Whether the folks use the membership or not, they’re still taking in the money.”

Over in Little Rock, Arkansas, the sentiment was the same. Paul Stagg, the CEO and owner of Splash Car Wash, said that the boom “wouldn’t be happening without the subscription model. Car washing today is like Netflix for your car.”

And subscription-based services are all the rage specifically because you can count on users to keep paying, even if they’re not actively using your service. Over at Business Insider, research revealed that 74 percent of 1,000 survey respondents struggled to remember their monthly subscriptions, and most people underestimated their monthly subscription fees by about $130. A different story from Fortune focused on a study that claimed businesses can see a 200-percent boost in sales from forgotten subscriptions alone. There’s a pretty good chance subscription-based car washes are counting on you to not use their service, since they’ll be making money either way.

Real Estate Investment

Perhaps the most compelling reason for a sudden growth in the car wash scene is the potential for real estate investment.

Here in Texas, cities like Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio are all flourishing as more and more people — and companies — flock to these regions. Subdivisions are being built left and right, and it’s getting increasingly more difficult to distinguish the limits of one city from the next. If you’re looking to invest in some property and also make money in the process, a car wash is a pretty easy, minimal effort way to go about it.

This isn’t just a result of local bootstrap entrepreneurs, though; one economist noted that private equity has been shoveling money into car washes left and right thanks to a lack of expenses.

All around America, private equity firms have been scooping up land left and right. More and more housing complexes are managed by corporate landlords, and I know for a fact that when I was in the market for a house, I was regularly outbid by a private equity firm looking to invest a little money in a house, only to turn around and flip it for a big profit shortly after.

A car wash is a pretty low-budget way to grab a little piece of real estate for yourself and make some money off of it while you wait for the ideal time to sell to a high bidder.

Low-Effort Business Models

A study from the U.S. Census noted that, as of 2021, car wash locations with fewer than five employees composed the lion’s share of industry, and those numbers were growing. In 2017, automatic washes made up 51 percent of all services offered by car wash business. Services that require the driver to do the heavy lifting — washing, waxing, or vacuuming their vehicles — composed around 20 percent of a company’s income.

If you ditch the self-service or full-service concepts in favor of an automated car wash, you’re not just saving money, but you’re making it as well. Let’s talk about Paul Stagg of Splash Car Wash again; as a veteran in the business, he’s run many different kinds of car washes and has found automation to be the best option. From Talk Business:

He noted full-service car washes, some of which he’d owned, all went out of business because at least half of the expenses went to labor. “But if you automate it and if you have everything right where it needs to be and if you have standards in place, then you can do it profitably,” he said.

After your initial investment to get your car wash up and running, you’re pretty much home free. You pay a few employees to keep an eye on things and undertake any necessary maintenance, and you let your customers do the rest. Easy.

Speed

Over in Little Rock, one analyst noted that fewer than 20 percent of all car washing is done in driveways these days. It wasn’t long ago that you’d spend a Saturday hand-washing your beloved vehicle. Now, you can pop in for a quick wash on your way home from the grocery store. Maybe that fella who suggested that modern drivers are low on vehicular pride are onto something, albeit with a little less “this generation sucks” insinuation.

Yes, many studies have confirmed over and over that modern Americans have way more free time than we used to in the past, but that doesn’t mean we perceive that to be the case. Most of those studies confirming our ample amounts of free time were conducted because so many of us constantly feel overtaxed.

That could be because other studies have talked about us living in a so-called “attention economy,” where we’re using way more brain power to cope with an onslaught of ads, social media posts, breaking news items, trends, and more. There’s so much to focus on that we don’t really focus on anything at all, and we constantly feel like we’re in a rush to complete all the tasks that we’re influenced to believe are necessary. We’re not really spending our Saturdays out washing the car anymore, not when we’re trying to catch up on that hit new TV show before we get any spoilers, or when we’re catching up on work, or when we’re just kind of scrolling through social media to see what our friends are up to.

I won’t go so far as to cast our attention economy as a generational fault, or as some moral failure, not when the crux of the issue generally lies within a capitalist desire to get more products in front of more people to garner more engagement and make more money. As long as we feel like we constantly need to catch up — with TV shows or movies or trends or posts — then we’ll keep opting for convenient services like automated car washes.