Friday, September 20, 2013

Rinse Cycle

Yesterday afternoon our washer quit with a basket full of clothes and the water level very high.

My husband diagnosed the problem and we ordered the part which will be here Monday.

But I had to do something about those clothes sitting in the water. I pulled them out, wrung each piece out as much as I could, and put them in a basket.

This morning, I went to the nearby laundromat to wash them completely and get the water flung out of them via centrifugal force.

Oh. my. goodness.

I put the clothes in a 40lb washer and saw that the cost was $4.75!  Ouch!  But I needed to do it, so I went ahead. Then I couldn't figure out how to put the $5 bill in the machine.

Turns out, one has to purchase an access card. It costs $1 on your credit card, but the machine doesn't give receipts. So once capturing my credit card info, I would have nothing to prove that they didn't take $20 vs. $1.

That's when I said, "no thank you."  I brought the clothes back home, and have draped them over the rails of our deck so at least the water can evaporate/run-off.  They won't be clean, but they won't be a sodden mass. When my husband fixes the machine on Monday (we'll be gone this weekend), we can run them.

But I started thinking about the economics of this situation.  I wanted to do only 1 load of wash. If one separates whites and darks, and is washing for an entire family, that would easily be two loads in the 40lb machine every week.

$4.75 x 2 = $9.50 x 50 weeks per year = $475 per year.  That's enough to BUY a washer.

And that doesn't even take into account the cost of using the dryers.  I think I'm being conservative with two loads as well, and of course, I didn't add the $1.00 for the access card!

Most of the people I saw in there were non-native speakers of English. The laundromat is in our most economically disadvantaged shopping center. Do you see the issue here?

I have been accused of being cheap on items like this, but not hesitating to indulge in the extravagance of my new bike.  Yep, it's true, I am cheap as well as profligate. That's because I have some options due to our income and careful stewardship. How much wiggle room does a family in the subsidized housing have? Or someone making $9 per hour? My daughter thought that was a lot of money but that's because she wasn't paying for any expenses living at home.  Wow...

1 comment:

Nonnie said...

Sorry about the broken down appliance. The cost at the laundromat is news to me, and yes, for families on a strict budget, that is really tough.