By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
There may be no more reliable sign of local Facebook economic illiteracy than the phrase: “We don’t need another car wash.”
Or gas station.
Or mattress store.
Or storage place.
Or chicken place.
Or whatever else somebody happened to see while driving by a construction site and feeling suddenly appointed Secretary of Commerce for Leon County.
It is one of the dumbest recurring civic comments in modern life — a smug little performance of fake sophistication by people who apparently believe the economy is supposed to operate like a personal Pinterest board.
News flash: the local economy is not curated around your aesthetic preferences.
A developer does not spend millions of dollars building a business because Brenda in Killearn is emotionally maxed out on car washes. A lender does not finance it because three guys in a Facebook thread have decided the corridor has “enough already.” Investors do not risk real money because somebody with a punisher skull profile picture thinks Tallahassee needs more “unique local concepts.”
They build because they think demand exists.
And if they’re wrong, they lose money.
That’s called a market.
It is amazing how many people who claim to love capitalism turn into Soviet central planners the minute they see a new commercial site plan.
“We don’t need another car wash.”
Who is “we,” exactly?
Did the city appoint a Council of Approved Consumer Preferences? Was there a countywide summit at which residents voted that, yes, one more dentist’s office would be fine, but a car wash would be a bridge too far?
No. What usually happens is much simpler. Somebody looked at traffic counts, rooftops, demographics, vehicle volume, disposable income, and site economics — and concluded the project could work.
That person may be right or wrong. But he is at least participating in the economy, which already puts him a step ahead of the Facebook commentariat.
Because here is what these critics almost never acknowledge: even the businesses they sneer at create value.
A car wash is not just a car wash. It is land acquisition. Site work. Concrete. Steel. Electrical. Plumbing. Engineering. Equipment. Signage. Landscaping. Professional services. Construction jobs. Permanent jobs. Property taxes. Utility revenue. Local spending.
Industry data suggest the sector supports somewhere in the neighborhood of 175,000 to 195,000 jobs nationally, depending on dataset and year, and the trade group for the industry says a new professional car wash typically creates 5 or more local jobs. Federal revenue data show employer-firm car washes generated more than $16 billion nationally in 2022.
In other words, even if a car wash is not your dream TED Talk economy, it is still an actual economy.
And that is where the social-media snobbery gets especially irritating.
People talk as if a town has somehow failed when it gets a car wash or a gas station, as though every vacant parcel should instead become a biotech campus, a beautifully branded mixed-use district, or perhaps a farm-to-table marketplace featuring artisanal stationery and moral superiority.
That is not how most local economies work.
Normal economies have ordinary businesses. Service businesses. Convenience businesses. Repetitive businesses. Businesses that solve boring problems for thousands of people every week. That is not evidence of decline. That is evidence that people live there, drive there, and spend money there.
The same people mocking “another mattress store” are often the first to complain that Tallahassee lacks private investment, lacks tax base growth, lacks higher wages, and lacks economic energy. Fine. But private investment rarely arrives wearing a tuxedo and carrying a white paper. A lot of it shows up looking mundane.
That does not make it worthless.
Now, none of this means every project is a good project. Some are bad fits. Some are poorly sited. Some create traffic problems. Some deserve scrutiny on design, access, stormwater, or compatibility.
But “I personally don’t like this kind of business” is not economic analysis. It is just self-flattering ignorance with a comment button.
And it misses a larger point.
The problem in Tallahassee is not that we have too many people willing to invest private capital in ordinary commercial projects.
The problem is that we do not have enough people willing — or able — to build the next layer of the economy on top of that: more headquarters, more scalable firms, more serious industrial growth, more homegrown wealth creation, more high-wage private employment.
That is the real conversation.
But it is easier, of course, to type “we don’t need another car wash,” collect a few likes, and pretend you’ve contributed something meaningful to local economic development.
You haven’t.
You’ve just announced that you do not understand how an economy works.