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.)