Washing the Car

Tonight before dinner I took the car over to the gas station around the corner and filled the gas tank, and then went through the automated car wash to get all of the salt, road dirt, and other crap that had accumulated on the outside of it over the past two weeks. Simplest, most natural thing in the world, right? Certainly nothing you’d weary your long-suffering blog readers with. But on the way home it struck me that there were at least three different business lessons to be had just in this ten-minute errand – which is at once why I love this discipline so much, and also why I keep saying I’ll never run out of things to write about in this blog…

First off, let’s consider the fact that it has been two weeks since I last put fuel in the car. For someone who grew up in Los Angeles, the concept is almost inconceivable. My daily commute before leaving L.A. to come here was 32 miles round trip, and in fact the shortest work commute I had the entire time I lived in Los Angeles was about twelve. In a car like our Pontiac Torrent, which gets about 16 miles per gallon in the city, the daily drive was taking up two gallons of gas per day, every day. With a 17-gallon tank, we could generally limit ourselves to one tank per week, but only if we limited our non-work driving rather sharply, and didn’t go anywhere on the weekends. Here in East Lansing, my daily commute is about six miles round trip, meaning that in an entire week I use roughly the same amount of gas that I would have used in a single day working at UCLA…

Actually, I could probably cut that down even more, considering that East Lansing has a quite good public transportation system, and there’s even a bus that goes from in front of my office to the supermarket up the street (half a mile or so). The point here is that because the University is located in East Lansing, it’s possible for students like me to get around for a fraction of what it would cost in L.A. or a dozen other cities. Of course, MSU has to be here – it’s been on this site for over 150 years now. But if you were going to select a new base for your company, choosing a city where even your lowest-paid employee can afford to get to work (and even senior management will spend a fraction of what they are used to on gasoline) might have a certain appeal…

The second point is the car wash itself. During the rainy season in Southern California you may want to wash the crap off your car from time to time, since all of that crud that you see overhead has to go SOMEWHERE when it rains, and it usually just falls on you. This pales in comparison to the salt, mud, dirt and dust involved in an urban/suburban setting in a cold-weather city in the winter. The salt used to keep the streets free of ice will also rust out every part of your car’s body if you don’t keep it clean. But the large, free-standing car wash operations common on the West Coast (and other warm-weather regions) are impractical on days when the ambient temperature is before freezing, so what you mostly see here in Lansing are small, completely-enclosed automated facilities like the one I drove through tonight. They’re not quite as effective at cleaning a car as their more labor-intensive cousins, but there’s something nice about being about to get your car cleaned whenever you want…

Which brings me to the very obvious third point: the gasoline was $1.49 a gallon. Lower than it was in the early 1990s when I was in graduate school the first time. Or, if you prefer, about a third of what it was in Los Angeles when I left, when everyone was talking about $9 per gallon and changes in our way of life. Will it go back to $4.50 by next summer? Will people go back to buying giant SUVs that get a quarter of the mileage my Torrent gets? Will the next year bring even more record profits for the oil companies, or will the car makers finally get back to good?

Darned if I know. I’m just pointing out that if you made plans based on $4.50 a gallon gasoline or the equivalent in diesel or heating oil you’re probably wishing you hadn’t; if you had all of your retirement funds based in some Wall Street investment scheme that seemed too good to be real you’re finding out it was; and if you bet the farm that a man of African ancestry would never be elected President of the United States, you’re probably out one farm. You’ve all heard me ranting on and on about the need for good business intelligence before making plans for the future. The past few months have demonstrated just how difficult that can be in exhaustive detail, but if you needed any further proof of it you only had to ride along with me tonight as I ran my errands…