Washboard – Ships you rolls of quarters for laundry | Hacker News Reader

Washboard – Ships you rolls of quarters for laundry

washboard.co

33 points_pius52 comments

If somebody told you to mail them $13.50 and they will mail you back $10, you would think they were crazy. But in today's world this is a valid idea for a startup?

I love that the justification is that places won't make change. Three foolproof steps to successfully obtaining change from a convenience store (clerks hate him!): (a) make a purchase, (b) pay with a $20, (c) ask for a roll back instead of the $10 and the clerk will drop one out of the safe for you.

When 30 seconds of your time exceeds $7 in value, implying you make $7 million per year, buy a washer.

EDIT: Before you start relying on this shit, heed the founder's subtle hint that he's not going to operate this business for very long: https://twitter.com/calebrown/status/479814086537281536

Personally, my going rate is about a quarter per roll, up to a dollar depending on which clothes are now my limiting factor and how badly I need them. (Two dimes buys a roll at my local grocer, which seems like a tolerable fee for their inconvenience.)

Now, if you want to be galled by the price, perhaps comparing it to the US Mint would help? I reckon the parent service is charging just about a third to half of what the mint charges for collector's grade coins [1] (depending on shipping). I think that's a fairly unflattering comparison. Even though I have some anxiety about asking a store clerk for something out of the ordinary, an extra roll of quarters for every four rolls is probably worth it.

[1]http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Category...

EDIT: Ambiguous pronoun.

If it makes money, it is. And it will probably make money, because so many people have been trained to accept that even minor inconveniences can and should best be solved by giving up some degree of personal autonomy or freedom to a startup because x is annoying or x is hard or because x is too analog.

What else can you say except that there's a sucker born every minute?

I don't live in a big city, but here in Dayton Ohio I've never seen a laundromat without a change machine. Further, those change machines don't skim off the top. The worst you're out is a $3 charge for an out-of-network ATM, and even that can be avoided with a minimal amount of forethought.

Am I missing something that makes this make sense?

All the off campus apartments at my college have laundry rooms with machines that only take quarters, but no change machines. Doing laundry, which is already a huge pain in the ass, was much worse for me because I also had to go to the bank and take out quarters.

> All the off campus apartments at my college have laundry rooms with machines that only take quarters, but no change machines.

This is a bug. File appropriately. Laundry rooms are not operated without ongoing maintenance because communal equipment breaks all the time. Operating a quarter machine is part of said maintenance companies' repertoire.

Oh trust me... it's just one of many, many bugs. The laundry room at my previous apartment was operated by a heathen of a company called Mac Gray [0]. They have some of the worst customer service I've ever encountered, and never more than half of their machines working at any given time.

[0] http://www.macgray.com/

Certainly someone needs to remove the quarters feom the washer dryers, so that person can also service the change machine?

No kidding, take quarters from washer, put back in change machine, extract cash, take cash to bank.

why wouldnt people have change machines?

I'm in Australia and the order form seems like it will have no issue with me ordering quarters (it even does an Australian postcode lookup), yet US coins are not legal tender here.

So... I can order lots of things that aren't legal tender over the Internet?

Why wouldn't they want to send you $20 in quarters for $27?

Couple of reasons: Coins are generally worthless once you take them out of their country of origin. Laundromats in Australia mostly accept 1 or 2 dollar coins. It would cost around $40 in air freight.

The website is indeed lacking SSL. The transaction is encrypted since it's using Stripe but if the host page lacks SSL, the browser shows no indication (nor should it since the majority of the page is unencrytped). This also struck me as an odd thing about Stripe... that they didn't have a redirect page you could use with its own SSL for businesses that wanted to use Stripe's in-browser checkout but didn't want to spring for an SSL certificate.

Also, I'm not really seeing the market for this. I've lived in NYC for years and I've never seen a laundromat without a change machine or someone at a desk to give you change... both with no surcharge. And my old university switched to card-operated laundry machines back in the 90s. Most new or renovated larger apartment buildings in NYC seem to operate this way now, too. And, as a fallback, you can always go to the bank and get change (there are 6 banks within 3 blocks of me... including 2 separate Chase banks across the street from each other... seriously).

Is there a large population of people somewhere outside of major cities with no access to banks and no washers and dryers in their dwelling or building but that has access to a reliable mailbox that people won't steal money out of?

I think you've almost got the market. My bet's on small (or just remote) towns with only one or two banks with limited hours coinciding with where the communal laundry services only accept quarters and the blasted change machine is always out. (These are the sorts of places where a vending machine that accepts cards would be a cool novelty.) I'd actually be interested to see how many people live in that kind of rural America versus large cities.

My college suffered from this, and I had a number of late nights where I was perfectly willing to pay two dollars for a buck fifty in quarters, just because there wasn't anything open in walking distance to get quarters.

As far as I've seen, the same places with these communal laundry services also tend to have many mailboxes consolidated in one place. These'll be locked, so the package of money is fairly safe, assuming it gets through the postal service safely.

Total OT:

If you ever get the chance to open a roll of quarters, it is a really cool mini-experience (kind of like cracking an egg). If you do it right, it looks effortless. Wrong, looks like you are trying too hard to make an omelette. One of those essential retail skills like box folding I admire.

I actually never realized that quarters were needed for laundry. All the laundry machines I've ever used have been card-operated or free. I've _seen_ coin-op laundry machines at laundromats (just from walking by) but I assumed there would be a change machine installed inside... Kinda makes me wonder what other simple problems of the general population I've been oblivious to.

I've never seen a coin-op laundromat here in NYC that didn't have a change machine.

The only people I see using this are fraudsters emptying stolen credit cards...

This was a real problem for us when we moved into our latest apartment with shared laundry room (that doesn't have a change machine). But after a while we figured out you can simply buy a $10 quarter roll at Trader Joe's if you ask nicely, so that's what we do since we're there every week anyways.

Our industry is fucked.

Soon they will announce a "laundering pro" tier that sends you bricks of $100 bills.

For those who can't figure out the change machine at the laundromat.

Or basic economics. Or a bank. Or a change jar.

Why could you not have existed two years ago?! This was one of the biggest pain points in my life, and now I'm finally living in an apartment with its own washing machine.

Thank you so much, this is awesome.

Why would anyone use this? This is the epitome of wasteful spending.

Agreed. Why should I pay $4.99 for quarters when I could go to the bank and get them for free?

Subscription pinball capacity?

The website is down. $4.99 for how many quarters?

The plans are $15 for $10-worth of quarters, or $27 for $20-worth of quarters.

Its $10 in quarters for $14.99 (or $20 for $26.99 on the higher tier plan).

I've done this. Amazon prime + other orders + laziness + $2.00 premium on a $10.00 roll of quarters = a slightly wasteful decision.

It's also worth noting that this is not a Silicon Valley company, but a Pittsburgh company: https://twitter.com/calebrown/status/479791618267299840

Interview with the founder: http://valleywag.gawker.com/real-startup-that-mails-you-quar...

So $15 for $10 of quarters a month. I can see how that would be worth it to save time on going to the bank. Not clear to me how near the range is where it saves enough time to be worth it to the person before they would just own a washer and drier rather then using a laundromat mat.

It might make sense in high population density areas where space in an apartment is at a premium. Any one from a high population density want to chime in and confirm or deny.

For lots of apartments (at least in the U.S.), the rental agreement specifies that you will not use any sort of washer or dryer. I guess it's another factor on top of density. I guess it's also somewhat legitimate, as a washer is relatively easy to install poorly and leaks are bad, and properly venting a dryer isn't always straightforward.

Washers+Dryers are a weird aspect of housing. They aren't really all that different (the models found in comparable housing especially won't be all that different), but people really like to move them and they are a 'premium' feature in rentals.

Wow, this was a bit of a culture shock when I moved to Mexico, in Europe I've never lived in a rental apartment that didn't come with a washing machine (even in my student days). I assumed it was a Mexico thing, amazed to hear it's the same in the US.

I really don't get it. Maybe it's different in cities (where I haven't lived much).

It is fairly common to not have an in-house washer/dryer in apartment complexes in the various high-population-density areas I've lived in the US; but it is also pretty common for such apartment complexes to have a shared laundry room on the premises somewhere.

These shared laundry rooms usually have a card system now where you can use a credit card to put value on a card that you insert into the washer/dryer to start it up. I haven't used quarters for laundry in a decade.

I'm sure YMMV depending upon location, in older cities like in the Northeast (I grew up in Boston but haven't lived there since 1995) I suspect things are probably different.

Yep, shared laundry is very common in older buildings and multi-family houses, but I've never seen such a place with a card system. They all took quarters. Who's going to bother installing an electronic system when you have one set of machines and 3 apartments?

I had to deal with coin-operated in-building laundry for years (mostly in New England), and it's definitely terrible when you realize you _have_ to do laundry tonight but you're out of quarters and it's too late to go to a bank. Time to start knocking on doors or making friends with the guy at 7-11.

I definitely thought about (and searched for) a service like this, but as everyone else has said, paying a 50% premium on quarters is tough to swallow. I'd have paid 10-20%, though. (But now that I have in-unit laundry, I'll never go back to shared if I can help it.)

Just in case you didn't notice, before you sign up for this, take a good hard look at the lack of TLS in your address bar. To be honest, though, if your card or any accounts got compromised because you paid for quarters to be shipped to you, the temptation for schadenfreude would be ... noticeable.

Welp, I'm gonna disrupt their business model by creating a laundromat operated exclusively by bitcoins.

Reminds me of the old Citywide Bank commercials from SNL: http://www.teachertube.com/video/220488

Our business is making change.

some quarters are worth more than a quarter. I wonder if they're looking for those, and replacing them with regular quarters before sending the rolls out?

Is this real? Social experiment?

Real.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/real-startup-that-mails-you-quar...

I would totally use this service, but only if they accepted Flooz.

The ridiculous idea aside, I'm still amazed by how you managed to double-post this and get away with it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7918862

There seems to be a lot of confusion about why someone would want a service like this. And that's understandable. Perhaps they have a nice bank in walking distance. Perhaps they don't work from 7am to 5pm, just in time for their bank to close. Perhaps their local stores don't sell rolls for a small charge (or feel silly going to the front desk to buy quarters - go to a bank after all!)

I bet it'd be nice living in a dense, convenient city like that. Me? I live about an hour away from Dallas (and commute there). I need $2.25 in quarters for the apartment's laundry, and the loads ain't big. And since I work in a plant, lots need washin'. So is just having a pile o' quarters worth 5 bucks a month?

I certainly feel better when I know I can do laundry without planning. Like knowing there's gas in the car when you leave the house. Or buying extra milk, just in case.

But you can also go to your bank (or the next time you happen to be at a bank) and ask them for a bunch of quarters...

Not to overly nitpick, but if your job doesn't let you out before the bank closes, then you might not. Of course, if you're diligent, just remember to make a special trip on your day off. But that can come rarely enough that quarters run short.

Perhaps one of the stranger things I've come across is a bank that wouldn't sell me quarters or money orders without having an account there; it was a convenience bank in a store, so I had mistakenly assumed it would be trivial. One of the more bizarrely awkward conversations I've had with a counter rep.

Genuine question: why not drive to the bank once every 6 months and get $50 in quarters?

This is actually what I do. There happens to be a branch none too far from where I live, so I just withdraw a few rolls each month.

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