One will soon be condos, one turned into donuts, one is slated for demolition to make room for an auto parts store, one became more space for a convenience store, and one just sits closed and moldering. Like other car-culture artifacts–car dealerships, gas stations–car washes are an endangered species in the city of Ann Arbor.
Manager Vern Campbell says his Community Auto Wash on South Industrial is the last full-service wash in the city. For as little as $15 they’ll wash the outside and vacuum the inside while you sit in the waiting room and scratch and sniff the new line of Yankee Candle car deodorizers like Bahama Breeze or Pink Sands (Campbell says Little Trees’ “New Car Smell” is the most popular, but you can’t scratch and sniff that brand). “It’s been a pretty good year. We’ve done 30,000 cars so far,” he says, adding that “weather and the economy has a lot to do with it.” When either is bad, cars go unwashed, or people do their own.
It turns out Campbell (no relation to Community’s owners, Kevin and Scott Campbell, who bought it in 2010) has a good perspective on car washes. He used to own a Mobil station in Chelsea with a car wash. “Those are kind of disappearing,” he says, as owners reclaim the space to carry more chips and soft drinks. A brief fad in car wash history, they occupied a kind of midpoint between fancy tunnel car washes and the DIY ones where you dropped in quarters and wielded the spray gun yourself. Little bigger than a one-car garage, they’d let you “pull in and park, and the machine runs around you,” Campbell says. Campbell himself used to come to Community as a kid. “It’s been here since the 1960s–that’s when the cement’s dated. I’d come through with my dad while mom went to the bread store.” The discount outlet for Holsum Bread is now a CVS.
“A lot of people think they’d like to own a car wash,” Campbell says. “When they hear it only costs a half million dollars to buy the equipment. But that’s only the beginning.
“Look at this,” he says, shoving a glossy trade magazine across the counter opened to an article. “This is what’s new in car washes.” Instead of a drivetrain that hooks behind the wheel, pulling the car through a conveyor belt, the whole floor moves. And a bank of computers about the size of a couple of dishwashers controls the whole operation–no more climbing down under the conveyor belt with a wrench. The patented system can “do 63,000 cars in sixty days,” he says, though the “patented” part suggests that when it does break down, it’s not cheap to fix.
Though they’re getting hard to find in the city, car washes haven’t disappeared entirely. Like car dealers, they’ve just been supplanted by newer, bigger facilities in nearby townships. The two Zippy Auto Washes are the newest and most high-tech washeries. Larry and Susan Paul manage the one on Ellsworth east of Costco. It has a customer-operated touchscreen, “kind of like an ATM. You just put your credit card in and choose what you want,” Larry says. You can also buy a monthly pass, and go through as often as you want. Susan says customers who live on Pittsfield’s dirt roads appreciate that option. “We have people who go through practically every day.”
Weekend customers tend to be from farther away–often doing their weekly shopping at Costco, filling up on its discount gas, and then heading down the street to buy a single wash.
Larry Paul says older car washes are closing because the “equipment is aging out.” But a contributing factor is the city’s ongoing redevelopment. The commercial equivalent of residential gentrification, it’s made once-marginal locations attractive for developers who repurpose the sites for more intense uses.
You might recognize those disappeared car washes above as, respectively, the DIY across from Argus Farm Stop on Liberty; the Shell Station at Eisenhower and Ann Arbor-Saline that replaced its car wash with a Tim Horton’s; the Big M Car Wash on West Stadium; the Shell station at Maple and Jackson; and the desolate former DIY on Federal.
