Welcome to my nightmare. (Photo: gregparis/Morguefile)
The second in a series of Cheapo Challenges: comparing the most expensive/convenient way of doing something with the least expensive.
Aside from moving to a new apartment, doing the laundry is my least favorite activity in the world. It is invariably a hassle: finding time, usually two hours or more, to go to the laundromat is the first dilemma. Then I’m faced with lifting heavy bags of clothes, finding washers that work properly, waiting for a dryer, folding endless t-shirts, and bundling everything back into laundry bags for the trip home via shopping cart. It’s easy to understand why seemingly all sensible New Yorkers get their laundry done for them.
Doing laundry is ripe for a Cheapo Challenge.
It appears that there are three ways of dealing with laundry: 1) doing it yourself at the laundromat; 2) dropping it off for the staff to do and then picking it up the next day; or 3) having it picked up dirty and delivered clean and folded to your residence.
Unfortunately, the least expensive method–doing it yourself–is also the least convenient. Just how much would it cost you to maintain sanity and valuable free time by having someone else do the laundry for you? Let’s find out.
Between Shannon and me, approximately 40 pounds of laundry accumulate every two weeks. We’ve chosen to do laundry every two weeks for a couple of reasons. One, when we left laundry to collect for longer periods, we had so much that we could hardly carry it up and down our stairs or fit it into our shopping cart. Two, we would end up using more washers and dryers; if we tried to cram our laundry into the fewest possible dryers to save money, we would just spend more money to get it dry. It really didn’t add up and it gave us backaches.
So, if we do the laundry ourselves at the best local laundromat (the one where more than half of the machines work at a given time), the cost breaks down as follows:
Two loads in the Maxi Washers = $7.60 ($3.80 each)
Two dryers for 40 minutes each = $2.80 ($0.35 for every ten minutes)
Detergent = $0.19 (I bring a big bottle of store-brand laundry detergent with me, which costs $3.99 and washes 42 loads. Each load therefore costs $0.095 and two loads cost $0.19.)
Folding and transportation: free
Grand total for doing laundry ourselves every two weeks = $10.59
Let’s compare the cost of drop-off service. At another local laundromat, the cost per pound of laundry averaged out to $0.80. For 40 pounds of laundry, the cost comes to $32.00 every two weeks, and we’d still need to haul the bags there and back.
The most expensive method is the pickup-and-delivery. We tried this once, hoping to simplify our lives, but we were shocked at how expensive the services were. Though pickup and delivery was free, the cost per pound was $1.27, totaling $50.80! With a tip thrown in for the delivery person, the total easily came to $55. Yikes.
Now for the yearly tally:
Pickup/delivery = $1,430 per year
Drop off/pickup = $832 per year
Doing it ourselves = $275.34
As much as Shannon and I loathe our laundry, we hate unnecessarily spending money even more. We decided reluctantly that doing it ourselves was the only way. At least the laundromat has flat-screen TVs and we can catch up on Judge Judy while we fold.
Recent Comments