Rate the Laundromat
with Nosey Parker
I have a lot of laundry to do. Every week I haul 3 big baskets, stuffed to muffin-top overfill with washing. It's a big deal that requires more than 2 hours of my time, a ton of soap, and about 25 bucks in quarters. Rain or shine. I’ve tried them all and I think it's time to play “Rate the Laundromat.”
I have made the rounds of the coin laundries in and around Sebastopol, trying to find just the right one, at just the right time of day, with just the right creature comforts to make my weekly chore just a little easier. Nobody's perfect. Nobody gets a 10—this is laundry we're talking about--to get a 10, your establishment should at least fold for me.
Nosey's Rating Criteria:
Cleanliness/maintenance: Has anyone cleaned a table or swabbed a floor lately?
Lighting: Can I read the letters on my Einstein Universal Tour tee shirt?
Working washers & dryers: preferably without grunge and funk
Noise: I gave up high decibels when Jerry Garcia died.
Entertainment: mags, newspapers, TV, radio, other people
Ambiance: A combination of art, sound and light that does not assault the senses.
Smells: Don't get me started...
Attendance: Who's minding the Store?
Location: Proximity to food, shops, parking, home, other humans.
Amenities: A bathroom is extra; a SINK implies the owner is human serving other humans.
Security: see Location, Lighting, and Ambiance, add Attendance or at least attention
Vibe: No blip on the Creep-o-meter.
I live a few miles West of town, so my natural first thought was—multi-task! Go downtown, pop the wash in to wash, run a few errands, make a few phone calls, pop back in time to put the wash in to dry, grab an espresso, window shop, back to the laundromat and fold, fold, fold 'til the cows come home.
My first stop was the laundry next door to the towns best frozen yogurt place, just off Main, but I'm not naming names. So excited to see one of each size washer—though why bother with the tiny ones--dedicated to biodegradable soaps. Cool. I'm in.
Small as laundries go, most of the machines worked well—3 papa bears, 2 mama bears, a few teen-agers, and a raft of baby bear-sized washers, 13 or 14 dryers. I learned quickly not to use the very biggest washers (doesn't wring out well enough) or the biggest dryers (not always the hottest ones). And, like the three bears story, mama-sized washers turned out the best-wrung, ready-to-dry sheets.
We got along fairly well, the laundry and I, until small occasional annoyances became predictable, irksome suckers on my otherwise sunny disposition.
One year and a 10 pounds of yogurt later the honeymoon had ended.
Dirty, sticky folding tables (no SINK), unidentified drying objects left behind, the choking aura of fresh marijuana during picking/snipping season, the unpredictability of free, working machines and nearby parking, and if I hear that door slam one more time...
Not to mention the new and fangled method of payment: plastic card. Dollars are slurped into a machine that records the pre-purchased amount. Push a button; receive a plastic card with magnetic strip to operate the machines. I never seem to use up all the money on the card, and I have to keep adding money to finish drying the laundry, but I can't buy in the same increments that I spend. Hmm.
Enough! In a moment of supreme generosity and huffy protest against The Man, I left behind 2 cards, each with .15 on them, for the next intrepid launderer. There are two or three more in the house somewhere...
A certain highly placed source in the laundry industry confided to Nosey Parker that a big selling point for those card machines is that the laundry owner collects thousands of bucks in the nickels and dimes never redeemed from those cards.
First date: 7.5 (might have been 8 or higher but for the learning curve on the card machine)
After rapid decline in basic maintenance with inverse incline in frustration: 3.5
A laundry serving downtown should look and act a bit uptown if you ask me, with a slam-free door.
Next Laundromat: one flanked by a pretty-good grocery, an okay pizza place and a video store, with a top-notch hardware store in very close proximity