The Cost of Laundry

I could see an app in this space working. I used to work in a laundry place when I was a kid, and the quarters thing was certainly annoying (and some machines didn't work all the times, etc). The owners don't particularly like filling/depositing them, etc.

Big problems are a) Adoption (selling the system to SO many independent shops. If you can get in with big REIT companies then that's easy, but 90% of those have smart cards anyway b) Outside of the the super high rent areas (New York, San Fran, etc) most people that use laundry mats are lower income, who may not have smart phones and/or credit cards.

Probably the biggest issue off the top of my head is that if you pay a monthly fee for laundry service, and the machines break, the tenants are losing money every second that ticks by and the machines are broken. Another way of looking at is is that the landlord all of a sudden has a lot more pressure to deal with when one of his machines break.

Contrast that to the per-use fee structure, in which case you don't lose any money when you go down to the laundry room and see the machines are broken - you haven't put your money in the machine yet.

My tenants would run whole loads for a single pair of socks if there was no per-load cost. The charge is a barrier to waste. I hate counting quarters, though... I'd welcome a better payment system.

I'm surprised this isn't more common, but at my apartment complex the machines are all payed by card. They give you a special card for the machines, and you can put money on it whenever you want. It was like this at college too, but with your student ID card. The machines at college also had slots for quarters, but I only ever used that when I forgot to put more money on my card.