Cherry was not a great idea. Had they done some research (well, the people who gave them 5.25 million dollars to waste away), they would have learned some very simple things. Disclaimer: I used to own and operate (as in also wash cars) a successful on-site car wash business. Closed it down because it was a pain in the ass to run.

On-site car washing (or any other type of on-site auto service (YourMechanic guys should pay attention)) is very low on margins, and competition is tough. You have to compete with every 13 year old kid who wants to buy a new playstation game and will wash cars for $5. You will also have to compete with every other joe who will basically wash a car for a couple of bucks. So creating a solid customer list is tough.

There are also logistics issues. Getting a group of car washers who are not complete and total fuckheads is impossible (I'd say its easier to win the lottery twice). Cherry tried to circumvent that by having sub-contractors, which in other words means giving some random joe $5 to wash some car. They only provided them with some basic equipment. If you have ever washed a car in the cold, you know that you need more than a fucking soap sprayer and a sponge. There is a lot of equipment needed to correctly wash a car in diverse weather conditions. Sub-contractors did not buy equipment because they were being paid shit. So, getting good employees is impossible, getting good sub-contractors is like finding out you have a rich uncle who died and left you money and that suddenly, every hot celebrity out there is hot for you.

There is also the issue that people dont give a shit about cancelling an appointment 30 seconds before it is due. That plus rain, shady owners trying to blame you for "missing stuff", and people who smoke. Its just a shitty business to be in. The only people who manage to do something in that market are the professional detailers. Those guys do make some good money, but have to spend a shitload of time on a single customer, and cannot (in most cases) reliably duplicate their business in order to have any horizontal growth. The high end market is also very competitive and customer loyalty is very high. No Porsche owner will have some unknown detail his baby in order to save $50.

Also, I so called this. This is one of those "investments" that makes you go "huh?".

Edit:

And here I was feeling bummed about wasting $600 on car washing equipment. 5.25 million bucks! Hell, give me $500k and I'll make Nuuton so awesome that people will say "Google? What is that?" :)

Hey guys - Dropbox product manager here,

tl;dr: The scenario described by the OP is now less likely to occur. Since October, individual Dropbox users are encouraged to create separate accounts when invited to a Team and warned that Teams admins will have control over the account.

We want individual and Team Dropbox users to have the best possible experience. Some users want to migrate their personal accounts into a Team. Others are much happier with separate personal and Teams accounts. We’ve been working to make that choice much clearer for the account holder and the Teams admin.

If users do choose to merge their personal account with a Team, things become a bit tricky. Teams admins want better control of data within a Team, and users want easy access to their personal stuff, but it’s not possible for us to differentiate between Team data and personal stuff in the same account.

Here are some thoughts on the points raised by the OP:

* Better support for multiple accounts: Users can quickly switch between using personal and Teams accounts on the web today and we intend to make this better across our platforms.

* Improved messaging to Teams admins: We plan to provide better messaging to admins before disabling an account that was migrated in.

* Disabled accounts are not immediately deleted: We can work with Teams admins and users to sort out account issues and recover users’ files.

We’ve contacted the OP to help resolve his case and are sorry for any pain this caused!