What Owning a Car Wash in Saint Paul Has Taught Me About People
- David Knutson
- Mar 27
- 7 min read
Nobody warned me that running a car wash would be an education in human beings.
I knew it would be hard work. I knew there would be equipment failures at the worst possible moments, and brutal Minnesota winters, and all the ordinary challenges that come with owning a small business. I was prepared for most of that.
What I wasn't prepared for was how much I would learn — about patience, about communication, about community — from the people who pulled into our bays on Rice Street. Specifically, from the people who arrived in this city from somewhere very different and figured out Minnesota, in part, right here.
That's the story I want to tell.
Rice Street Is Not an Average Street
Rice Street runs through one of the most genuinely diverse corridors in the Twin Cities. Drive it on any given day and you'll pass Hmong-owned restaurants, Latino grocery stores, East African businesses, Karen community organizations, and a hundred other signs of a neighborhood that has been shaped by wave after wave of people who came here and decided to stay.
We sit right in the middle of that. Have for over 25 years.
That means our customer base has never been one thing. It has always been many things — many languages, many backgrounds, many different relationships with cars and winters and the concept of a car wash. And learning to serve all of those people well, meeting them where they are, has been one of the most rewarding and humbling parts of this job.
Rice Street didn't ask us to adapt to its community. It showed us, over years, what that community was made of — and we tried to rise to meet it.
The First Minnesota Winter Is Unlike Anything
If you grew up here, Minnesota winters are just life. You know instinctively to brush off your car, to give yourself extra time on icy roads, to wash away the salt before it has a chance to settle in. It's so deeply embedded in how you move through the season that it barely registers as knowledge — it's just what you do.
For someone who moved here from Southeast Asia, East Africa, or Central America, none of that is obvious. The cold alone is a shock. The ice is a different kind of driving entirely. And the idea that the roads are being covered in a chemical compound that will silently corrode the underside of your vehicle all winter long — that's genuinely new information that no one has told you.
I've had so many conversations at the bays with customers — Hmong families, Hispanic families, newer arrivals from Somalia and East Africa — who had no idea what road salt was doing to their car. Not because they weren't paying attention. Because nobody had explained it to them. Because it's one of those things that longtime Minnesotans take for granted and forget to say out loud.
Road salt is invisible and ruthless. It doesn't stain your paint — it eats your undercarriage, your frame, your brake lines. By the time you see the damage, it's already done.
Once I explain that — that a $10 wash in January can prevent a $1,500 repair bill in the spring — I almost always see the same thing happen. A pause. A nod. And then they come back. Regularly. Because now it makes sense. Now it's not an expense, it's protection.
Those moments of connection — of actually helping someone understand something that will protect their car and their family's investment — are among the most satisfying things about this job. It doesn't feel like sales. It feels like being a neighbor.
The Language Gap — and How We've Bridged It
In the early years, the language barrier was real and sometimes genuinely difficult. A customer would pull up, I'd try to explain how the system worked or help them troubleshoot something, and we'd both end up a little frustrated — not at each other, but at the gap between us.
You learn quickly that a smile, a gesture, and a willingness to slow down go further than you'd expect. You learn to read body language. You learn to demonstrate rather than explain. You figure out, together, how to get the car clean — and somewhere in that process, something human happens. A laugh. A thank you that doesn't require any words. A moment of genuine connection that transcends whatever language either of you speaks.
But technology has changed things too, in ways I couldn't have imagined when we first took over in 1998. Google Translate on a phone — held up between two people at a car wash bay — has facilitated more conversations than I can count. AI tools are getting even better at real-time translation, making it possible to actually talk, not just gesture.
Where possible, we've posted signage in English, Spanish, and Hmong throughout the wash because no customer should feel lost or confused about how to use a service they're paying for. That's just basic respect.
The multilingual signage we've added to the self-serve bays is one of the things I'm most proud of. Not because it's a grand gesture — it's actually a pretty simple thing to do — but because of what it says. It says: you belong here. This place is for you. We thought about you when we were setting this up.
That matters to people. I've seen it on their faces.
What Gratitude Looks Like
I want to be careful here not to make this sound like charity, because it isn't. These are customers. They pay for a service. The relationship is mutual and straightforward in that sense.
But there is something that happens over years of serving a community well — especially a community that doesn't always feel seen or welcomed in every business they walk into — that goes beyond the transaction. There is a loyalty and a warmth that builds up that I don't take for granted for a single moment.
When we were facing the decision in 2021 about whether to reinvest in the business — new doors, upgraded self-serve equipment, new vacuums, credit card readers in the bays — one of the things that tipped the scale was thinking about our customers. The Hmong families who had been coming since the late nineties. The Hispanic families who had made us part of their regular routine. The newer arrivals from East Africa and Southeast Asia who were still learning how to navigate Minnesota and had found something reliable and welcoming on Rice Street.
The gratitude and loyalty those communities showed us over the years is a direct reason we stayed. A direct reason we invested. They gave us a reason to believe this corner was worth fighting for.
The same was true in 2024 when we upgraded to the Petit i360 touchless automatic and added monthly memberships. Those communities had grown. Their kids were driving. A second generation was pulling into the same bays their parents had first discovered when they were new to this city. That continuity — that trust passed from one generation to the next — is not something you walk away from.
The Challenges Are Real — and Worth It
I don't want to paint an unrealistically rosy picture. Running a small business on a diverse urban corridor has genuine challenges. There are communication breakdowns that no amount of goodwill fully resolves. There are cultural differences in how people approach a service business that require patience and flexibility on both sides. There are hard seasons — economically, politically, emotionally — when keeping the doors open takes everything you have.
The summer of 2020 was one of those seasons. The uncertainty of COVID, the pain of what happened in our city, the businesses that closed around us — all of it was real and hard. It would have been easier, in some ways, to walk away.
We didn't. And a significant part of why we didn't is because of the community that had shown up for us. When you have customers who have trusted you across language barriers, across cultural differences, across the long winters and the hard years — walking away from that feels like a betrayal of something important.
The community gave us a reason to stay. The least we could do was stay.
What I'd Tell Any Small Business Owner
If you own a small business in a diverse community, or you're thinking about it, here is what 25 years on Rice Street has taught me:
Meet people where they are. Don't assume they know what you know. Don't assume they speak your language or share your frame of reference for something as basic as a Minnesota winter. Take the time to explain. Demonstrate. Use whatever tools you have — a phone, a translator app, a sign in someone's language — to close the gap.
The effort is always worth it. Not because it's good business, though it is. Because it's the right way to treat people who are doing their best to build a life in a place that is still new to them.
And if those people feel welcomed — if they feel seen — they will come back. They will bring their families. They will tell their neighbors. They will become, over years, the kind of customers whose loyalty you'd never trade for anything.
That's been our experience on Rice Street. I suspect it would be anyone's experience, anywhere, if they showed up the same way.
We're Grateful for This Community
Rice Street Car Wash wouldn't be what it is without the people who have trusted us over the years. The longtime residents and the newest arrivals. The families who have been coming for decades and the person who pulled in for the first time last week and wasn't sure how the machine worked.
Every single one of them is the reason we're here. And every single one of them is welcome.
If you've been a customer — thank you. If you've never been in, we'd love to meet you. And if you know someone new to Minnesota who doesn't yet understand what a January without car washes does to a vehicle — send them our way. We'll explain.
Rice Street Car Wash — Proudly Serving the Saint Paul Area Since 1989
Family-owned by David & Haley Knutson since 1998.
Open every day, 6:30 AM – 7:30 PM.
📍 1736 Rice Street, Saint Paul, MN 55113
📞 651-300-9274
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