The Federal Way News located in Washington State recently wrote an article that car wash operators and charity organizers ought to perk up to. It’s that time of year again when community organizations and small groups come out in force washing cars to raise money for their varied causes. While many smaller organizations depend on the funds raised by these makeshift carwashes, they can hurt business for professional carwashes, and it turns out that they’re bad for the environment too. According to the article:

…before you send all that oily, soapy water down the storm drain, Federal Way’s Surface Water Management Division and the Puget Sound Car Wash Association (PSCWA) want to remind you that not only is this very harmful to wetlands, streams, and lakes, but it is also a violation of state, local, and federal pollution laws.

Unlike the sanitary sewer systems, water that runs into the storm drains goes directly to lakes, streams, and wetlands with little or no treatment.

Runoff from car washes is highly toxic to aquatic life and is one of the reasons that streams are not as healthy as they should be. [read more...]

At the end of the day, professionally operated carwashes are typically more environmentally friendly than non-professional washes. The article recommends that fund raising groups team up with professional washes who will donate some of the proceeds. From a marketing standpoint, while not likely to make as much money when donating proceeds to charity, a car wash that works with community service groups has an excellent way to generate free advertising and positive publicity while attracting new customers.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips seem to be popping up everywhere these days. As RFID chips get smaller, innovative companies are finding more uses for them. These chips serve as a method of remotely storing and sharing data via radio waves. Similar to the magnetic strips on the back of credit cards, RFID chips can be attached to cards, products, and even animals. Some RFID advocates even imagine a future where you can go to the store, shop for the items you want to buy and simply walk out of the store with them. Scanners on the store exit would automatically detect what products you’d purchased based on their RFID chips and send you a bill.

Though RFID chips have not been deployed that widely yet, a company name Innovative Control Systems has recently introduced RFID technology in an attempt to streamline the payment process at car washes.

ICS is offering the RFID system as a value-added service to its customers in the car-wash industry as part of the ICS Auto-Sentry touch-screen payment terminal. This terminal can process cash payments (it dispenses change), as well as payments made with magnetic-strip credit or debit cards. As such, it can be deployed at unattended car-wash stations, where customers drive up to payment kiosks, select the type of wash they want, pay and follow instructions to enter the automated car-wash tunnel. [read more...]

If the technology takes off, it would allow busy car washes to automate the payment process and reduce the overall time it takes to wash a car. This is good news for both consumers and car wash owners. Consumers would no longer be troubled by sometimes confusing car wash payment menus and car wash operators could wash more cars per bay.

Circulating the internet this week is a story that every carwash operator should note.

Magic Wand Car Wash Systems recently installed a car wash for an investor in Frederick, Maryland. Shortly after the system was installed, the owner of the new Magic Wand Car Wash started complaining that he was losing large amounts of money from his carwash coin machines every week. The owner even suggested that Magic Wand employees might be using stolen keys to remove money from the machine. In response Bill Daugherty, owner of Magic Wand, set up hidden surveillance cameras to try to catch the thieves in the act. What they found was quite surprising and is pictured below:

Perched and obviously practiced, the starling digs deep.

No worries — he finds what he’s looking for: three quarters!

It turns out that this little criminal, AKA a starling, works in gangs and is attrcted to shiny objects. The carwash operator reported losing hundreds of dollars to the birds and would some mornings find, literally, dozens of quarters on the ground beside the coin machine.

So this true story seems like proof that a good surveillance system at a carwash can be invaluable. It also goes to show that sometimes it is best to keep an open mind when those quarters go missing!

This story has been confirmed by Urban Legends.

What’s in a business sign? A lot actually. A good carwash sign can make a business thrive. The owners of Elephant Car Wash in Rancho Mirage, California, know that their pink elephant carwash sign gets a lot of attention locally, but when they recently decided to give the sign a makeover, they found themselves in the national spotlight as well.

“If you looked at it right now, because of the cold weather - it was so harsh to the sign,” said Anthony Antonis, who co-owns the car wash with his brothers, Michael and John. “It’s such a pillar of the community.”

The car wash serves about 200 cars daily and doubles that number on the weekends, he said.

Customers may not know the business’s name, but they know the elephant. “I hardly remember the name; I just call it the car wash with the big elephant,” said Palm Desert resident Eve McCulloch. It’s a hot spot for photo opportunities, manager Gary Deines said.

“Every night, I see someone taking a picture,” he said. [read more...]

What’s that? People stopping to take a picture with your business sign? That’s right, it’s become something of a landmark. When completed, the restored sign will have new neon lights and cost about $9,000 — a small price to pay for the media punch this sign packs.

It’s nearly 40 degrees in Rochester, Minnesota. While that might not sound very warm in some parts of the country, it’s scorching for this time of year in Minnesota. The warmer weather means that people are out to wash all that salt and grime off their cars after the weeks of cold weather and adverse road conditions. This combination of factors has made one of the busiest weeks of the year for local washes. Some washes are doing between 200-250 cars per DAY!

Regular car washes help make the car look better and last longer, Ayers said.

“If you don’t maintain the finish, it’s more likely to fade and crack and peel and rust — all those nasty things,” Ayers said. [read more...]

On another interesting note, the article concludes by saying that “the car wash industry in the United States includes 14,000 full-service car washes with combined annual revenue of about $5 billion. ” Breaking that down, each wash is earning, on average, $357,142.86 annually.

This month has been sweet indeed for carwash operators in Northern parts of the country — especially the Northeast. Larry Biasotto, owner of Glove Carwash in Delaware caught my attention by putting it this way: “Salt is our sugar.” Yes, that just about sums it up for carwash operators in areas lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective) enough to receive buckets of snow this February. Delaware was one of those states to get hit hard by snow and ice.

So far, the state has dipped into its 21 statewide “barns,” where salt is stockpiled, to the tune of about 15,700 tons. While tonnage figures for last year were not immediately available, Westhoff said, he checked around and learned anecdotally that the amount exceeded this year.

The 15,700 tons already has been replaced by International Salt of Clarkson, Pa., which supplies Delaware with the sodium chloride, he said, and DelDOT has restocked the barns to their 64,000-ton capacity.

The stuff spread on roads is almost pure salt, with a little anti-caking agent mixed in, he said. DelDOT mixes it with water to create a brine for its pre-snow salting. After it snows, the salt is poured on without the water, with the strategy that traffic will break down the large granules and mix it in with the ice and snow.

That’s one reason less-traveled roads often remain snowy, he said, because the salt hasn’t been broken down.

This year, the salt has outlived its welcome because the snow hasn’t been deep enough to plow, which usually would scrape the salt off the roadway, too, Westhoff said. [read more...]

Arizona is a hot and dry place in the summer. This combination of factors means that water conservation is sometimes necessary. In response, Arizona carwash operators are doing their part to save water by recycling it. Modern carwash water recycling equipment can reduce water use by as much as 50%. Although more expensive to install, these systems can pay for themselves in the long run. They also give an environmental marketing edge to commercial carwash operators. Additionally, water reclamation systems in commercial carwashes can actually use less water than hand-washing.

Tom Collins, a general manager with National Carwash Systems, says that local municipalities are increasingly asking carwash builders to install water reclamation systems when they build their carwashes:

Collins advises new car wash owners to, if they don’t install the full water reclamation system, at least install the piping required, because, in his mind, “it’s only a matter of time” before the system is required everywhere.

“There are a lot of local municipalities that are requiring them,” he said.

About 25 percent of new car washes have water reclamation systems, estimates Arizona-based car wash architect John Reddell, who planned Mercado Del Rio. He said more than half have just the initial piping system. [more...]

At the end of the day, carwash operators are finding that water conservation systems make sense for the environment and for the bottom line too.

Carwash owners Shelly Phillips and Cindi Sanders managed to increase carwash sales by knowing the needs of their community and adding unique services to their “Wash Me” carwash.

Phillips said the company has more purpose than just clean cars.

“No one paid attention to what this community needed,” Phillips said.

She realized there are many people in the community who have fixed incomes. She wanted to make sure Wash Me offered a range of packages and prices for those who want to spend a little or a lot.

One way of doing this is offering oil change services. “We’re kind of one-stop shopping for oil changes and car washes,” said Phillips. And they wanted the services to be available seven days a week. [more...]

When Wash Me first opened in 2005, Shelly and Cindi washed the cars by hand. But as their business continued to grow, the invested almost $1 million dollars and acquired a new conveyor wash system from Ryko. Phillips and Sandars hope to open new washes in the future.

Water restrictions in Australia require people either to wash their cars by hand without a hose or go to a commercial carwash. Water efficiency tests have shown that well-designed commercial carwashes use less water than washing cars with a hose. The end result is that local carwashes in Australia are seeing a significant increase in business.

Richard Holloway, a Queensland member of the Australian Car Wash Association’s executive committee, said car washes across the southeast corner had seen increases of about 20 per cent “pretty much across the board”.

“The industry certainly is getting a lot more cars through as a result of (the water restrictions) because people are not that interested in going through the process of washing their car with a bucket,” he said.

Mr Holloway, who runs the Carwash Headquarters at Ashmore on the Gold Coast, said all operators had to stick to new water efficiency management plans.

“In my case, we’ve put in a new water management system in the last four months and we’ll use two-thirds of the water this year than we did last year, even with the increase in business,” he said. [more...]

Icy roads and winter travel conditions can give drivers headaches, and create more work for road crews — but it’s an annual dream come true for carwash owners. Each layer of salt and sand the road crews put down often ends up on cars. Those cars often end up at automatic carwashes.

Tim Newell, manager [of] Jet Stream Car Wash on Witzel Avenue, said no summer day in the business can compare to a winter month with a lot of snow.

“People are concerned about getting salt off their vehicles,” he said. “If the weather and road conditions are good (after a snowstorm), we could easily double or triple a nice weather day in the summer.”

Full-service car washes like Jet Stream have seen a 3 percent increase in business from 2002 to 2005, according to the International Carwash Association. Meanwhile, the number of survey respondents who said they’ve pulled the rags, soap and Turtle Wax out of the garage and washed their vehicles at home declined 20 percent from 1996 to 2005. [more...]