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Comment by davorak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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