The older, wiser and poorer I’ve grown, the more I’ve come to believe that many of the “convenient, time-saving” habits adopted by older generations of yuppies are nothing but lazy, resource-guzzling, ass-fattening wastes of time and money.
Case in point: Taking your car to the car wash vs. washing your car yourself.
When I was a very small child, my family washed our own cars, or at least we did most of the time. I remember filling a bucket with soap and water, lathering up and rinsing the good old Mercury Sable, lugging out the vacuum to suck the dog hair from the seats, scrubbing the tires, Windexing the windshield - and having a bit of fun in the process. My dad, ever the jokester, would spray us kids with the hose, we’d spray him back, etc. Good, wholesome fun it was, especially on a hot summer day.
Sometime in my teens, we became car wash folk. Maybe it was because we had more money; maybe it was because getting out the bucket and sponge seemed too taxing - I don’t know. But in middle school or so, cleaning our car transformed from a chore to an errand. We’d drive a few miles to the car wash, turn our keys over to an attendant and sit, paging through Us Magazine, until our car was made shiny and new-looking, with no exertion of effort from us.
In retrospect, what a waste of time and money!
Here’s the thing: factoring in the time it takes to get to the car wash, wait in line for your car’s turn, get your car to cleaned and then return home, unless you live like micrometers from a car wash, you’re fooling yourself if you think you’re saving anything more than five minutes.
As for money, you’re using gas to get to and from the car wash and paying people/machines to do the (relatively simple, kinda fun) work for you.
Rule of thumb: if it involves someone else’s labor, it’s probably more expensive than doing it yourself. International sweat-shop labor is an exception - I know I couldn’t make myself a tank-top for $7, but somehow H&M can sell me one at that price - but the American service industry, car washes included, inflates the price of the service.
(Not that you can blame them. Car washers have to eat. They have bills to pay and families to feed. So of course paying them to do something for you is going to be costlier than doing the thing yourself. I’m not saying the car wash is evil. It’s just less convenient than I, at least, tricked myself into thinking it was.)
Yesterday I got out a bucket and filled it with water and added some soap and, with my handy-dandy microfiber car-washing sponge, lathered up my red Jetta, scrubbed her down and made her shine.
The upfront cost was about as much as two car-wash car washes, but I have enough supply to wash my Jetta many, many times. All I need now is 20 minutes, gym clothes, nice-ish weather and a bucket of water.
OK, so I also need to not lock myself out of my apartment next time. That kind of sucked, leaving my keys on my kitchen counter and being without a cell phone and having to walk to the nearest bar and borrow the bartender’s iPhone and log in to Gmail to find the phone number of the friend who has my spare set of keys. But whatev. That was idiocy on my part and had nothing to do with car washing in and of itself. I’m all for manual labor, but in the future I’ll try to be less of an airhead.
Oh, and P.S., if they install a Japanese car wash near me, I will use it:
I have a bit of a counterpoint, but it’s not going to apply to everyone. I don’t wash my car because I want it to look clean (OK, occasionally when it’s been bombed one too many times by birds). It’s silver and rarely looks very dirty. If you’ve got a car that shows dirt really well, maybe that’s something to think about when you buy your next car. But I digress. I also live in New England, famous for cold winters and road salt, among other things. While washing your car in the summer is easy, cheap, and might even be fun for some, who wants to wash their car when its snowing and 28 degrees out? So if you live somewhere that has real winter weather and you’d rather not pay the $5 to $10 for a car wash, guess what, you’re probably not going to wash your car between November and March.
Which leads me to my actual point — I wash my car to get that road salt off of it. And not just off the parts that you can see; the important parts are the ones you can’t — underneath the car. The ones that rust if left alone. Even if you do hand wash your car in winter, you’re still going to have a hard time getting the undercarriage clean unless you use a pressure washer. And just spraying the underside of the car could make things worse by dissolving the salts and leaving a salty solution sitting there to rust everything it touches. I’ve done the DIY car wash (where you put in quarters to use someone else’s pressure washing setup) in winter before, but it always costs me the same as an automatic car wash.
Again, if you live in a warm climate or don’t plan to keep your car very long, this doesn’t apply to you. But otherwise, car washes are not simply cosmetic, but an important part of preventive maintenance, just like oil changes.
Good points, lh. I figured I’d still use the car wash in the winter (I, too, live in the Northeast. On some days I think the soap would freeze to the car before I could wash it off!) Hadn’t thought of the maintenance issues though, so maybe an occasional trip to the car wash in the warm months would be worthwhile, too.
Thanks for the comment!