End Hand Car Washes Bring Back The Machines

Nothing depresses me as much as car cleaning.  It’s bad enough having to buy, run and finance a car without cleaning it.  That said there was a time when one needed to clean one’s car because the paint could come off easily.  These days however paint is much better so save from cleaning off a bit of bird shit – which will damage the paint if left on - one should never actually need to clean one’s car.  I didn’t clean my previous car once in 7 years.  It got cleaned by the garage when it went in for a service and it got cleaned by the rain.  And that was it.  When I sold it the lack of cleaning and even the many bodywork scratches made zero difference to the price.  Vauxhall already had another mug lined up to absorb its spiralling service costs…

So how come there’s an entire industry these days in hand car washing?

There are may criticisms that can be made of this industry - such as exploitation - but my main critisim is it seems pointless.  I remember when it was done by machines.  Beautiful wonderful machines that even in the 1970s had enough fuzzy logic to know the exact size of each different type of car and how to break off its wing mirror.  But it was the future.  It was technology.  And now we have people doing it "by hand".  As if the car is being washed in hands not soap and water.  If you can't afford to buy a Rolls Royce that is hand made then you can have hand cleaning.  Of course nothing was ever made by hand since the industrial revolution and what is the benefit of making most things by hand?  Or indeed what help is it doing things by hand when a machine could do it better?

Is it some kind of fitness initiative invented by the government to help us all live longer?  If people wont walk to work we'll invent some kind of physical activity for the sake of it ...I know ... washing cars by hand.

Why the fad with hand car washes - they sprout up everywhere like mushrooms?  Is it that in the era of Amazon where the High Street and Public Houses are dying this is the only remaining outlet for service industry?  Don't get me wrong I've got nothing against service industry but... It's like in the era of Amaxon, Netflix and Dowloads there's so little physical to sell that this is all that is left?

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up "by hand." Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand as was our car.