#014: We The People - Part 2

THE FEATURE

Last week, I took you back 250 years.

I told you about colonial laundry in 1776, about the women who washed soldiers' clothes during the Revolutionary War, about Sarah Osborn Benjamin who followed the Continental Army from West Point to Yorktown and at 81 years old argued before a court that her work as a laundress deserved a pension. I told you about Washington's letter from Valley Forge describing nearly 3,000 soldiers barefoot and shirtless, and how disease killed more of his men than British muskets ever did.

If you missed it, go back and read Issue #013. It's the foundation for everything you're about to read.

This week, I'm picking up the story where I left off. This is the birth of the American laundromat. And it ends with a single afternoon at my store in Ada, Oklahoma during a snowstorm the week before Christmas.

Fort Worth, Texas. April 18, 1934.

The country was in the grip of the Great Depression. Unemployment had peaked above 25%. Families were struggling to eat, let alone afford the new electric washing machines that had started appearing in wealthier homes. Most Americans didn't even have reliable electricity.

On that day, a man named C.A. Tannahill opened a storefront in Fort Worth with four electric washing machines inside. He charged people by the hour to use them. There were no dryers. Customers washed their clothes, wrung them out, hauled them home still soaking wet, and hung them on a line to dry. There was always an attendant on duty.

He called it a "Washateria." The name was a combination of "wash" and "cafeteria," the idea being an affordable, self-service model. Just like a cafeteria gave working people access to a meal they couldn't cook at home, a washateria gave working people access to a machine they couldn't afford to own.

Let that sink in for a second.

The very first laundromat in America was built on the same principle that every good operator still runs on today: giving people access to something essential that they can't get on their own. That's not a business model. That's a mission. And it started less than two hours from where I sit right now in Oklahoma.

The washateria wasn't glamorous. It was four machines in a room. But customers lined up because the alternative was spending an entire day doing backbreaking labor by hand, the same way their great-grandmothers had done it in 1776. That storefront in Fort Worth didn't just rent washing machines. It gave people time back. Hours of their lives, every single week, returned to them.

Every operator in America is in the business of giving people their time back. If you don't understand that, you don't understand what you do.

If that doesn't sound exactly like what we do today, you're not listening.

The Name You Use Every Day

Here's something most operators don't know. The word "laundromat" didn't come from the industry. It came from a marketing department.

In 1940, a public relations man named George Edward Pendray was working for Westinghouse Electric. He coined the name "Laundromat" by combining "laundry" with "automat," a reference to the coin-operated Automat restaurants that were popular in cities like New York and Philadelphia. Westinghouse trademarked the name and used it for a new line of automatic front-loading washing machines they released after World War II.

During the war, production of domestic washing machines was halted entirely. Factories were building for the war effort. But research and development continued. So when production resumed in 1946, the machines that came off the line were better, faster, and more efficient than anything before them.

Then in 1947, an inventor named Harry Greenwald developed a coin-operated timing device that could be attached to a washer. He partnered with Westinghouse to install these coin meters on their Laundromat machines, and the modern coin-operated laundromat was born.

That single invention changed everything. Before Greenwald's device, every laundromat needed an attendant on duty at all times to collect payment and operate the equipment. After it, a store could run unattended. Customers could walk in at any hour, drop in their coins, and wash their clothes. By the late 1940s, the first 24-hour unattended laundromats were open for business.

The Westinghouse trademark on "Laundromat" eventually expired in 1993. By then, the word had become so common that it stopped being a brand and became the name for an entire industry. Just like "washateria" before it, the brand died but the name lived on.

Every time someone says "I'm going to the laundromat," they're using a word that was invented by a PR man at Westinghouse 86 years ago. Every time a customer drops quarters in your machine, they're using technology that traces directly back to Harry Greenwald's 1947 patent. The business you run today was built on the back of inventions made by people whose names you've probably never heard.

Until now.

An industry that doesn't know its own history can't write its own future.

The Boom

The late 1940s and 1950s saw an explosion of laundromats across the country. The post-war economy was booming. Families were moving from cities into suburbs. Women were entering the workforce in numbers that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. Apartment living was surging, and most apartments didn't have room for laundry equipment.

Laundromats filled a gap that nothing else could. By the 1960s and 1970s, the industry hit its golden age. Stores became community fixtures. Owners added wash-dry-fold services, dry cleaning partnerships, vending machines, and seating areas. Laundromats weren't just places to wash clothes. They were places where neighbors talked. Where kids played while their parents waited for the spin cycle. Where a community gathered, sometimes without even realizing it was gathering.

It's easy to look at that era and think it's gone. That the golden age is behind us. But I don't believe that for a second. I think the golden age of the laundromat is happening right now, for operators who understand what the industry has always been about.

The washateria in Fort Worth wasn't built to make money. It was built to solve a problem. The laundromats that thrived in the 50s and 60s weren't successful because of their equipment. They were successful because they became part of the neighborhood. The stores that will define the next era of this industry are the ones that go back to that original purpose: giving people access, dignity, and community, in a space that happens to have washers and dryers in it.

The laundromat was never about the machines. It was about the door. Who it's open for. And what they find when they walk through it.

Ada, Oklahoma. December 2022.

I want to tell you about a single afternoon that taught me more about this industry than anything I've read in any book, podcast, conference or any trade publication.

It was the week before Christmas. A snowstorm had blown through Ada and dropped four or five inches of snow on the ground. My attendants called in because they were too nervous to drive in it, so I jumped in the Tesla and drove over to cover the shift myself. The store stayed consistently busy throughout the day, which didn't surprise me. Snow days don't cancel laundry.

Around 1pm, a tall, slender man walked up to the front of the store. He caught my eye because he had plastic Walmart bags tied around his ankles, covering what I assumed were his shoes. He had a duffle bag on one shoulder and a bicycle rack from a car receiver hitch slung over the other. He had neither a bicycle nor a car.

He came inside and asked if he could get warm.

We have strict anti-loitering rules at our stores. In a town like Ada, with a significant homeless population, our team enforces those rules regularly. But it was the week of Christmas, there was snow on the ground, and something about this man made me decide to let it slide.

I offered him a bottle of water. He accepted gratefully. He sat down in the back corner of the store and started removing the plastic bags from his ankles. That's when I realized he had no shoes. No socks. Just bare feet inside Walmart bags, walking through the snow.

Now, if you run a laundromat, you know this: customers leave laundry behind constantly. We collect anywhere from 30 to 60 pounds of abandoned clothes from our dryers every single week. After 30 days, if nobody claims it, we dispose of it. But at any given time, we've got bags of unclaimed laundry sitting in the back storage room.

I went back there and started digging through the oldest bags. I was looking for shoes. I didn't find any. But I found socks, a couple of jackets, and a couple of sweatshirts. I took the socks out to him and apologized that I didn't have shoes to give. I offered him some of our contractor trash bags to replace the Walmart sacks once he tripled up on the socks.

He stayed in the store until about four o'clock that afternoon. He was quiet. Never aggressive. Never asked for a single thing unless I offered it first. He had light facial scruff, thicker brown hair under a worn tan beanie, and tattered gray cargo pants. I wanted to help him in a bigger way, but I didn't know how. I offered to take him to the homeless shelter.

His response stopped me cold.

"That's for people who really need help."

I don't think he was being proud. I honestly believe he didn't think he was in need. I think he thought it was just another day in the neighborhood for him. My heart went out to him because I wanted to make his life better, but even if I'd had a better option for him, I don't think he would have taken it. He didn't want to inconvenience anyone. A man with no shoes, in the snow, the week before Christmas, and his primary concern was not being a burden.

You will never fully understand what walks through your door. But you can control what they find when they get inside.

When he decided to leave, I offered him whatever snacks he wanted from the vending machine. He accepted. The only thing he asked for in return was whether he could leave the bicycle rack at the store until he came back the next week.

I said sure. I put it in the back storage closet and stuck a note on it.

He walked out the door and headed west, out of town, with the snow still blowing. I never saw him again.

Two Hours Later

The store was still open. Still busy. Same door. Same snowstorm.

A one-ton Dodge diesel truck pulled up and parked right in front of our door in the handicapped spot. The driver obviously wasn't handicapped. He came inside and loudly announced to the entire store that he needed to get his laundry done.

I greeted him. He tossed a laundry bag on my scale and said he wanted it back tonight. Twenty-one pounds. Overpriced button-down shirts with heavy stitching all over the backs of them. I told him it wouldn't be possible because we were closing early and the order wouldn't be done until we reopened. He didn't like that. He pulled a hundred dollar bill from his pocket and threw it on the counter before I could even check the order in. Said he didn't have time to wait and to give him his change when he came back.

He turned around and walked out the door.

He came back the next day. Paid exactly the amount of the bill. No tip for the team member who had driven through the snow to get his shirts washed. The attendant said he never said thank you. Just took his change, grabbed his bag, and walked out. I looked at his account later. He never came back.

The Bicycle Rack

After the man with no shoes left that day, I put his bicycle rack in the storage closet with a note. Every month, my manager would call and ask if she could toss it. Every month I said the same thing: "Let's give it another month."

I kept it for over a year. Twelve months of my manager calling. Twelve times I said let's wait.

He never came back. Eventually, I threw it in the dumpster.

I think about that bicycle rack sometimes. A man who owned almost nothing in this world asked me to hold onto the one thing he couldn't carry. He trusted that it would be there when he got back. I don't know where he went. I don't know what happened to him. But for a year, I kept my word, even though he never came to collect.

How you treat the people who can do nothing for you says everything about the kind of operator you are.

Same Door

The washateria in Fort Worth opened its door in 1934 so that anyone who needed clean clothes could walk through it. Ninety years later, the same door opened at my store in Ada. And on a snowy afternoon the week before Christmas, two men walked through it who could not have been more different from each other.

One had no shoes. One had a truck that cost more than most people's homes. One didn't want to be a burden. One couldn't be bothered to say thank you. One left behind a bicycle rack that I held onto for a year. One left behind nothing but a receipt.

This is what a laundromat is. This is what it has always been. From the women scrubbing soldiers' shirts on the banks of a creek in 1777, to a washateria in Fort Worth during the Depression, to a store in Ada, Oklahoma during a snowstorm 250 years after the founding of this nation.

A laundromat doesn't ask who you are before it lets you in. It doesn't check your bank account. It doesn't care what you drive or whether you drive at all. It opens its door, and whoever walks through it gets the same service.

That's the most American thing I can think of.

This country was built on the belief that all men are created equal. A laundromat is one of the last places in America where that belief still shows up every single day.

C.A. Tannahill built a place in Fort Worth for people who needed access to something they couldn't afford on their own. I've built up a store in Ada for the same reason. At one of our locations, the average household income is $18,000 a year. Not individual. Household. I built a world-class facility there anyway. Air conditioning that many of our customers don't have at home. A place that is safe, positive, and encouraging, no matter how bad life gets.

All disguised as a laundromat.

For 250 years, this is what the people in our industry have done. We've served everyone. We've asked nothing about who they are or where they came from. And the work has never stopped mattering, not when Sarah Osborn was boiling shirts at Valley Forge, not when the first washateria opened during the worst economy in American history, and not today when my team sterilizes bedding for sick children and bloody surgical linens for a medical clinic so they can keep doing their jobs.

Happy 250th, America. And to every operator reading this: your store is more than a business. It is one of the last truly democratic spaces in this country. A place where every walk of life comes through the same door, sits in the same chairs, and uses the same machines.

If you're only counting quarters, you're missing the point of why you're here.

We the people, indeed.

FROM THE FLOOR

The left-behind laundry detail from my story above is something every operator deals with and most handle the same way. You wait 30 days, then you toss it or donate it.

But I'd encourage you to think about it differently after reading what I just shared.

The reason I went digging through those bags wasn't because I have a policy for it. I don't. It was instinct. I saw a man with no shoes and I went looking for something to put on his feet. The fact that I had three weeks of abandoned laundry in my storage room meant I had something to give.

Hannah and I have started thinking about this more intentionally. Unclaimed laundry isn't trash. It's inventory for moments you didn't plan for. Socks, jackets, sweatshirts, blankets. These are things that people in your community might need, and you have them sitting in garbage bags in your back room right now.

I'm not telling you to start a nonprofit. I'm telling you to pay attention. The next person who walks through your door with nothing might walk out with something, if you're ready.

STEAL THIS

The 30-Day Bag Audit

Go into your storage room right now. Look at the unclaimed laundry bags you've been holding. Before you throw them away, sort through them once.

Set aside anything that's in decent condition: socks, jackets, sweatshirts, blankets, jeans. Put them in a clean bag and label it. Keep it in a place your team knows about.

You're not building a charity. You're building a resource for the moment you didn't see coming. Because it will come. A customer who lost everything in a house fire. A parent who can't afford to replace a coat. Someone with Walmart bags on their feet.

When that moment comes, you'll either have something to offer or you won't. This costs you nothing but five minutes and a trash bag.

THE GAP

This two-part series was a labor of love. I spent more time on the research for "We The People" than anything I've published in Max Capacity, definetely the most research I've done since college. And the response to last week's issue confirmed what I suspected: operators are hungry for content that treats this industry like it matters. Because it does.

If you've been reading Max Capacity and thinking about what it would look like to go deeper, to get inside a room where operators share real numbers, real strategies, and real solutions, Laundry Advisors is where that happens.

I invite you to consider joining our mastermind group at LaundryAdvisors.com/Growth. We have operators from all over the world who meet every month to learn, encourage and grow their laundromats in ways you can never do, going at it alone.

If you have questions, let me know. I love to talk shop.

~Josh