Your sub-contractor part does hit me straight in the heart, because I'm a sub-contractor right now. Its not all rosy and nice, but I do get to work remotely and make my own schedule. It also allows me to work on Nuuton without having to worry about IP issues with an employer. But would still consider a good remote job offer. ;)

Edit:

I also have to add that I studied this market from every angle. Even went as far as testing an android app to get customers to order car washes through it. People would download the app and just create an appointment through the app to get their car washed. Payment would be handled by the app itself. But it tested horribly and the local market did not want it. In the end, its just one more business that did not work out. After a dozen or so, it doesn't make you feel bad about it failing. :)

There aren't any. The problem is that car washing is an extremely low-margin and low-volume business relative to other industries. High margins are measured in the singles of dollars; high volumes frequently means reaching double-digits in customers in a single day.

Cherry's business model actually increased the costs of business substantially by adding in costs for traveling, equipment, employee or subcontractor acquisition, insurance that would apply to infinitely variable service sites, and marketing costs that a normal car wash service would not have to deal with (note: making a distinction between a car wash service and a car wash facility; the two are separate and distinct business models). Thus, economically, it was essentially impossible for Cherry to succeed without first conquering the basic problems that dog existing car wash services.

And see, you just said something very important. You see yourself using them. But tell me, who washes your car right now? How much do you pay them? How come you don't have one of the local on-site car wash businesses come by and work on your car?

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!

I have to agree with @orangethirty comments on this page. There is not enough margin in the auto service business to let this succeed. I have known people that washed cars professionally in both small high-end detail shops and full-size car wash operations. The high volume car washes are staffed largely with people that could not get better jobs - felons, drug abusers, those with no education or other job skills. The small high end detailers were generally guys that loved cars and found happiness in polishing a Porsche for an afternoon. There was an old guy named Al that used to come by my office and spend an hour on my truck for $30. I don't know where he went, but I miss the service. You do the math on what his income was per year if he had to travel, pay for soap and supplies, and then only grossed $30 per hour. My math estimates that he couldn't be netting more than $25,000 per year.

YourMechanic will also hit this same problem. They promise 30% savings and at-your-door service. This will run into the same issues. There is not 30% margin to cut at any small auto repair shop that I have ever dealt with. For those keeping track, I sold equipment to 200 auto repair shops over a ten year period. There are many car repair problems that are not fixable in the field. The bigger problem is that auto mechanics have the same rockstar ninja aspects as software. The rockstars simply will not be doing brakes in the rain, outside of your work in the parking lot. Why would they? They can earn $100K a year at a dealer, there is no way they are going to earn less in your parking lot. In worse conditions. In the rain.

Ask the question in a different way. Would you prefer to work in a heated/cooled work environment with restrooms nearby, a break room, a place to wash your hands, specialized tools and equipment nearby, support staff to get your parts, queue up the next job, a counter guy to deal with the customer OR----- would you like to work in the rain, deal with angry customers, no restroom, not enough tools or equipment with you, doing jobs that become much harder because of location, etc etc all for 30% less money? You will not get any talented person to work for you. They have better options. Auto repair is very talent driven, especially any area that is hard like diagnostics, transmissions, or solving the problem that the last 3 shops couldn't figure out.

You wouldn't expect to produce good code in a parking lot, would you?

And then there is the classic problem of auto repair. Once you touch the car, the customer finds all sorts of things that YOU apparently did even though you didn't. Scratches, dents, missing items, the list is long and familiar to all.

* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.

* Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm.

I think what a lot of companies in this space are unaware of is that, no matter what problem you ostensibly solve, you are also ultimately solving how to scalably acquire talent. I think one thing that has helped immensely over the last 4 years is that the recession has created a pool of under/unemployed resourceful people that these startups are now capitalizing on.

* Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning.

* Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount.

* Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.

People who don't wash their cars just don't care enough about their cars to wash them. That's it. Also, finding a good house cleaner is not the same as a good car washer. You can stroll into a tunnel type car wash any day of the week and not have to worry about a thing. Having a stranger come into your home to clean is really stressful. Congrats on finding a good service provider for that.

shalmanese 2 hours ago | link | parent | flag

I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims:

* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.

* Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm.*

Have you ever had a car washing business? How did you fare with finding a good staff?

* Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning.*

Oh charge a fee you say? How do you think I will do that? Credit card? Then I have to deal with chargebacks and lose even more money than not doing anything. Mail them an invoice? Not going to work. Please provide some insight into this because I do want to learn how you would do this.

* Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount.*

My model could only be priced at a given rate because of competition. By pricing in fucktards I would be pricing myself out of non-fucktards.

* Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.*

You are right. But it does not take 5.25 million dollars to prove that Cherry would not work. Just a couple of thousands to test at a local market. In fact, most startups these days don't need millions of dollars to prove their business model. They just need thousands, not millions. Thats why YC only gives people a small bit of money as seed. They know that there is no need to spend that much. Where you do need money is to scale the operations and that varies a lot from business to business. Cherry would have been able to scale without much money, because they did not do anything themselves (the sub contracted the work).

I do appreciate that you took the time to reply, but I have real world experience with this, whereas you only are speculating while using Silicon Valley startup logic to it. Doesn't apply (hardly ever, actually).

Plus, we really don't need more wasteful services. No way to collect and recycle the waste water for example. Car washes are just ugly wastes of a resource we don't have enough of.

But, what if I don't believe in tipping?

> But the industry’s biggest recent innovation involves its business model, which has increasingly focused on membership and recurring revenue.

...

> Now, washes can take just 90 seconds, labor costs have been automated down, and recurring revenue from memberships has eliminated weather risks. Plus, the tax reforms enacted in 2017 by former president Donald Trump allowed car wash owners to claim 100% depreciation on new equipment — a generous subsidy to further investment. While that incentive was written to shrink over time, the tax proposal currently in Congress would restore the 100% depreciation allowance.

...

> In analyzing usage patterns, the industry soon found that the convenience of wash memberships translated to higher profits. A typical non-member may come in three or four times a year, while a typical member gets that many washes each month. But at $20 a month, that’s a huge jump in annual spending — more than enough to cover the costs of accommodating heavy users who may scrub their SUVs dozens of times a month.

SO - at least where I live, the number of monthly payment/unlimited washes car washes has exploded in recent years. Even so, there's often a line (of very new, very expensive) vehicles waiting at them.

As the article says, automated or even semi-automated car washes don't provide much employment or sales tax revenue. On sunny days, some of these washes have vehicles sitting in line, waiting their turn...most with their engines idling.

I live in an apartment so managing my own washing is impractical, and is actively discouraged by the landlord. My 15-year-old car goes through the wash three or four times a year, and it's finish is still fine, thanks.

I'm curious too. In the process of looking for relevant information (which I haven't found yet), I see that each washer Cherry contracts with in California will have to pay for a $250 per year car washer license. They'll have to do a pretty large number of washes before they start making any money.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/HowToObtainCarWashRegistration.ht...