The Feature

For the first 18 months we owned our first laundromat, I didn't raise prices one time.

It wasn't because the idea never crossed my mind. I thought about it all the time. I just believed what everybody else was saying.

If you've spent any time in the laundromat groups on Facebook, you know the script. Don't raise prices. You'll hurt your customers. They'll walk down the road to your competitor. Owner after owner says it, and every one of them sounds completely sure.

So I listened. And I held my prices right where they were.

The math that changed my mind

By our second year, we were getting ready to open our second store. Opening a new location means living inside the numbers for months, and somewhere in all that planning I took a hard look at our first one.

We had grown that store from three turns a day to ten. It had 20 washers. So I asked myself one simple question. What happens if I go up a quarter?

I ran it on the washers alone, without touching the dryers. The answer came back at about $1,500 a month.

Not once. Every month. Twelve months a year. And the next year's quarter stacks right on top of it.

That's when it hit me. Holding my prices flat hadn't protected anybody. It had just quietly drained money out of my own business, month after month, for a year and a half.

The night before

I'd love to tell you I ran the numbers, made the call, and never looked back. That isn't what happened.

The night before our first increase, I was a mess. I remember turning to Hannah and asking her, "Should we really do this?" I went back and forth in my head for hours.

Looking back, that anxiety seems a little ridiculous. But it was real, and I think a lot of you have felt the same thing. The voices that had me so worried belonged to other owners, and I know now that many of them simply weren't good operators. I let people who didn't know what they were talking about make my decisions for me.

The side of the ledger nobody mentions

When owners talk about why they won't raise prices, they almost never mention the other half of the equation. Your costs don't wait for permission.

Your water bill climbs. So do electric, gas, and advertising. And if you're running your business the right way, your team gets raises too. At Wash Bar, we give raises twice a year, because the people who show up for us deserve it.

When every bill goes up and your prices don't, you aren't standing still. You're giving yourself a pay cut. It's small at first, and then one day it isn't.

A quarter a year won't cover every one of those increases by itself. That's not the point. Depending on the size of your store, it does a lot of the heavy lifting to offset them, and whatever's left over is real margin.

Small steps beat big jumps

Here's something I've learned since that first nervous night. Customers almost never leave over a small, steady increase. What sends them out the door is the big one.

Put simply, people don't freak out over small increments. They'll leave you over a larger amount.

The owner who holds flat for years and then has to make up for it all at once is the one who sees people walk. I would much rather make continual small moves than one big painful one.

What it looks like now

We've now raised prices every year for four years. A quarter per washer and a quarter per dryer. We don't announce it. We don't post a sign about it. We don't tell anybody.

And that nervous, second-guessing feeling I had the first time?

In the first week of January this year, with three stores running, I pulled our card system reports for all of 2025. I ran the same math I ran that very first time, a quarter on every washer and every dryer.

That's more than $70,000 a year, from the same customers who were already walking through our doors. The more machines you run and the busier you get, the bigger that one quarter becomes. It grows right along with you.

This year, I'm running an experiment. Our next increase won't wait for January 1. It goes in on November 1. November and December are our two busiest back-to-back months of the entire year, and I want the new prices in place before the rush hits. I'll tell you more about that next week.

From the Floor

The customers who walked out

Our second store sits in a town of about 5,000 people. The average household income there is around $18,000 a year. Not per person. Per household. The people are kind, but there just isn't much in that town to make a living.

If there was ever a place where raising prices should have backfired, it was this one.

In that store's second year, we did its first price increase. Somewhere around 15 or 20 customers told us they were never coming back. I'll be honest, I was nervous when I heard that. It felt like everything the naysayers had warned me about was finally coming true.

Then I started paying attention to who those customers were.

They were the same people who told my attendants, every single visit, that their washer didn't work or the dryer didn't dry their clothes. They were the ones causing the most wear and damage to our machines. They were the ones walking off with the toilet paper from the bathroom and pulling entire rolls of paper towels off the wall.

Our revenue dipped for a little while, but by less than 1 percent. It was barely a blip. And in exchange, the store changed. It got quieter. My attendants had fewer headaches. That open space started filling up with customers who actually wanted to be there.

I'm pretty sure some of the ones who swore they'd never come back have quietly returned over the years. Either way, I never planned for any of that. I raised prices to cover rising costs, and it ended up improving the entire feel of the store.

Steal This

The Quarter Test

Next week in Part 2: why I never announce a price increase (it goes back to my insurance days), and the exact system we use to raise prices across three stores without the drama.