But it's certainly reasonable to assume most of his customers are middle class individuals with enough discretionary income to spend on occasional car washes. The articles point is not that your friend doesn't deserve credit in creating jobs, but the initial creation is only one part. Sustaining those jobs requires sustaining the customers and to do that they must maintain enough discretionary income to spend on car washes. With the income disparity ever increasing it's easy to see the middle class fading and as that happens so shall your friends car wash business.
If I run a car wash with a sign, "red cars washed free", and you paint your car red, have you defrauded me? You're not really a red car, you're just pretending!
"No way to collect and recycle the waste water for example." - yeah, but there was no waste water from the wash. Cherry used a waterless carwash solution that actually worked pretty well.
My husband was working for Cherry as a second job 3 days a week, and we're really sad to see it go. The money and hours were decent, and he thought it was better than being stuck in a coffee shop or something like that for a second job. He was solidly booked with customers on the days he worked, so I don't think Cherry folded for lack of customers. I also want to point out that not all Cherry car washers were social rejects who had no others options for work except for menial labor... my husband is college educated, we just needed some extra cash.
I think the real crime here, which no one has brought up, is that Cherry gave ZERO notice to the washers that it was going to fold up yesterday. We got an email last night that it was over effective immediately. I'm glad it wasn't our only source of income, but even a weeks notice to get things sorted out would have been nice. FU Cherry!
If you pick a car that is dusty / muddy, you can be pretty sure that the owner is not overly fussy about their car, and hence quite likely to have a positive reaction to a free wash. The probability that someone with an obviously dirty car getting actively upset about an unsolicited wash would seem to be sufficiently low to justify the risk, I would have thought.
The last cab company I worked for had a car wash in the yard that usually managed to make the car dirtier than it was before it was washed. But that was their 'standard', it was free and I really didn't care so...
Not necessarily. I might receive an unsolicited offer to have my windows washed by a guy at the lights. I welcome it because my windscreen is dirty, and I give him $5.
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