Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes?

Re:Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes? by HeyLaughingBoy on Sunday March 17, 2024 @01:32PM (#39736195)

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.

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Re:Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes? by greedo on Sunday March 17, 2024 @07:14PM (#39738934)

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.

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Re:Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes? by HeyLaughingBoy on Sunday March 17, 2024 @08:13PM (#39739246)

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!

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Re:Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes? by beede on Sunday March 17, 2024 @10:31PM (#39740037)

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.

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Re:Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes? by HeyLaughingBoy on Monday March 18, 2024 @08:26AM (#39743334)

I'm guessing OP was referring to the average over multiple stalls.

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Re:Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes? by greedo on Monday March 18, 2024 @04:51PM (#39749861)

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/

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