Windshield Wash

April 7, 2004 - Ed looks for a Squeegee

It seems that one of the driving factors in people’s behavior these days is the elimination of downtime. We get our morning coffee to go, answer emails while talking on the phone, install TVs in our cars, eat Balance Bars instead of balanced meals, watch the movie instead of reading the book, and talk on our cell phones while walking down the street. Many people these days even have those Blackberry Devices that allow them to send and receive emails and check stock quotes while they are walking down the street. Sometimes, people are doing so much multitasking it’s hard to find someone on the street who’s not too busy to ask for the time.

One of the biggest time-sinks of all is the time people spend pumping gas. Those SUVs with their extra cup holders, DVDs, multi-row seating, and GPS systems burn lots of fuel and need proportionally large gas tanks. To badly paraphrase Jimmy Cliff, “the larger the tank, the larger the fill.”

And what do people do to fill up the time while they are filling up the tank? Why, they wash the windows, of course!

The dedicated staff of edhat.com, who every Tuesday make it a habit of driving past every single gas station in town for our weekly price check, decided to put on the brakes and have a look at the window washing capabilities at the some of the stations.

It could have been in a distant place long, long ago, or in could have been just last week, but the dedicated staff has vivid memories of not being able to clean a dirty windshield because of a lack of fluid or squeegee. Maybe it all happened in Mojave, and the memory was triggered on the recent trip to Mammoth. Ed has been under the weather lately. Louie will tell you more about this tomorrow.

Whatever it was, the dedicated staff of edhat.com is happy to report that the state of gas station windshield cleaning equipment is good. Every single bin of washing fluid had enough liquid in it to get the job done. And, most bins had squeegees. In fact, the only station where we found any hint of a problem was the 76 station up in Winchester Canyon that only had one squeegee and one of the two bins had marginal liquid level. It was crowded and we eye witnessed a woman waiting for a squeegee. We left quickly before a fight broke out.

While we did not do any chemical analysis, to the naked eye it seemed that most stations put some window cleaning solution into their fluid. The notable exception was Arco whose fluid looked like straight water.

The results of our study were that 100% of bins had water and 91.5% of bins had squeegees. RSChom with a guess of 99%/90% was the subscriber who got closest to the correct numbers. RSChom cleans up. He/she wins movie tickets or another prize of choice from the edhat.com prize bag. The appropriate movie after winning the edhat.com “car window cleaning” contest? How about Car Wash?

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