I mean…it IS, but I suppose I wasn’t clear. What you’re describing is an in-bay automatic wash…all touchless, electric eyes, dwell time with soaps, etc. But the don’t clean as well nor do they come close to drying as well.
Can we take a deep breath please? PKbites, you’ve always struck me as a cool poster on here and fairly even-minded…jeez man! Hold up a second!
Just because something “whirls” doesn’t make it a brush. They are called “wraps” or “Z wraps”. Yes, they rotate, but they are made out of microfiber cloth that is so insanely saturated with lubricating soap that you’d be shocked. I am not calling you a liar, so ease up man.
When I was in this business I sent my (very nice) new cars through every day (even though I knew that wasn’t the best for them due to the constant exposure to acid soaps) and I very closely inspected my cars for a variety of things…any damage? quality of wash? ETC. for thirteen years straight!
Am I saying we never damaged a car? Hell no. If the “wraps” are set too aggressively on their pneumatic cylinders as they sweep down the sides of cars, vehicles with less than stellar side post mounted mirrors might get ripped off (Pontiac, 1984-20??).
We’ve scratched cars too. We had a guy sneak through our super secret teenaged defense system with an open bedded pickup truck that had some fishooks in it. We didn’t catch it right away and he scratched 12 cars after him from the mitter cloth (the strips that dangle down and clean your car from front to rear) that the fishooks became tangled in. We re-painted all those cars, because it was eminently provable.
I am sure there may have been some in between calls that I had to make as the manager of the business.
But if every car wash operator paid for every person that claimed paint damage to their car, there wouldn’t be any more car wash operators, right?
No guarantee of volume consistency from a business standpoint. Like I mentioned earlier, weather dependent is the catchphrase. Too good a climate, too long between washes. Too bad? Not enough washes. Goldilocks? More money. It makes it harder for investors to look too far outside their window in this business.
I say that knowing full well that there are plenty of successful operations out there in all the States. My experience is in the MidWest, and lies with Mike’s Car Wash. They are arguably one of if not the most successful express exterior wash models in the US with a large regional footprint.
As I posted before, I don’t give a rip what they are actually called or what they are made of. I have a new cars appearance damaged by one of them as have others. And once bitten, twice shy, you know. I will take my older vehicles through them, but not my newer ones.
If you know so much about the biz, how about sticking to the OP and giving us some numbers. How much is that place making on the wash I’m paying 80 cents for? Are they betting that people with the monthly plan aren’t actually using it as often as they could?
I’ll vouch for this. My Honda’s paint and finish lasted a long time going to my touchless car wash, but those of my wife’s VW Jetta, going to her favored brush damned spinning thing car wash, suffered visible wear and damage.
Not piling on, but I, too, am wary about car washes with spinning brushes, cloths and foamy strips. Fish hooks are sort of extreme, but what about dirt and grit that gets picked up from all of the cars before mine? You don’t think that they get dirty and abrasive from previous vehicles? How often are the cloths and strips changed in your car washes?
Certainly, weather is a big factor, but so are traffic counts, which side of a commuting road you are on, surrounding population density, disposable income and competition. The last one is sometimes overlooked, but it’s common for a new car wash to significantly impact nearby businesses that were operating fine. That happens with all sorts of businesses, for sure, but it seems to be more pronounced with car washes.
It’s hard to ascertain if they’re making money or not without seeing their volume numbers spread throughout an entire year in relation to the types of washes/extra services, etc that are being purchased as a percentage of sales. If they’re only doing 20 cars per hour on a conveyorized wash process in the salty snowy winter then they’re fucked. They should be doing over 200 cars per hour in those conditions. This is how you make up revenue for the rest of the year when you’re slower.
In this market where I live, the express car washes range from $8 for the basic wash all the way up to $20 per wash (which is frighteningly close to full service car wash pricing territory). We always had our numbers pegged at $5.80 per wash to break even, and that included labor, water, electric (significant cost), chemicals, etc.
The biggest difference is that the “extra” wash packages only cost the operators pennies in chemicals while the amount of labor per car remains static along with every other cost, so that’s where all the profit is. I can make $1.20 selling you my basic wash at $8.00, or I can make $8.20 per car selling you my $14 Works wash. Obviously the overall sales for a month or a year are going to be a blend of these, which is why we always trained our attendants to be salespeople and not order takers, and incentivized the up selling of washes to the employees with some small commissions on top of their hourly rate.
I don’t want to get too deeply into the damage thing again (maybe I should start another thread?), but I can say that not all operators are as scrupulous as we were. We tested several washes before we would open on our own cars, check the cloth for foreign objects, etc both before, during and after business hours. We had a huge checklist to conduct before we could open.
The fact is the cloth is designed not to hold grit or abrasives and if there’s a long enough break in between cars we’ll run a “wet down” where all the equipment will turn on while the tunnel is empty and the cloth gets sprayed down with lubricating soaps.
That’s another thing. The soaps used in the car wash business are extraordinarily slippery. I mean Dawn concentrated to the 100th power slippery. This in conjunction with the designed properties of the cloth make the cloth slide over the car and polish it, not “scrub it”. Severe dirt and grit are sprayed off the car by the attendants prior to the vehicle entering the wash. Pickup trucks with open beds are not allowed through unless the bed is clean and empty. We pissed off a lot of people with trucks turning them away for this reason.
Yet another thing is that the equipment operates in a very specific way, the same way, every time. The cloth that you see rotating? It only touches the front bumper, the sides and the rear of your car. Not the hood. Not the roof. Not the trunk. Those parts of the car are cleaned with what are called “mitter curtains”, which are those long, fat finger like strips that hang down from the ceiling. They swing back and forth on a basket they are attached to and clean the car from front to back.
Hopefully this has been educational for you. Any further questions please fire away.