Jordan Berry [00:00:01]:
Welcome to Laundromat News Today. I’m your host, Jordan Berry, or your anchor. Dang it. I don’t know. Whatever. I’m your anchor, Jordan Berry, and we are bringing you news from around the world today in the Laudermat industry. And we’re going to start off with something I think has been touching a lot of laundromat owners specifically, and that is the ICE deportations that have been going on around the country. I just.

Jordan Berry [00:00:26]:
I wanted to point it out. We really haven’t really addressed it here, but want to point out that I have spoken with a lot of laundromat owners that have been affected by this. I have had more laundromat owners reaching out to me who are, you know, interested in selling right now just because their business is down and, you know, they just, you know, are feeling frustrated. And a lot of people are just sharing that their business is down 10, 15, 20 or more percent right now. So I want to share that because I know as being a business owner, this can be very isolating. And it can feel like, hey, I’m doing something wrong. My business is down right now. And I just wanted to share that.

Jordan Berry [00:01:06]:
You’re not alone if you’re in that boat. It hasn’t affected everybody, obviously, but it’s affected a lot of laundromat owners. And also, I also just kind of give you a little bit of hope. I’m starting to hear trickles of businesses bouncing back here. So hopefully that will be the case for the majority of us out here. The businesses will begin bouncing back, both with revenue and our employees being able to come back and feel safe if that’s affecting your employees or their families at all there. So I wanted to point that out. There’s an article out about that.

Jordan Berry [00:01:39]:
I don’t know where this laundry was, but they were just. They were speaking about how it’s been affecting their laundromat business. So there’s an article again, the link to this article and all the articles will be in the newsletter. So make sure you’re subscribed over there@laundm resource.com and you can get links to all the news stories every single week. And I want to take one quick second if you’re out there and you’ve got a news story, big or small. Listen, send it over news laundresource.com we would love to feature it in upcoming news segment. All things laund could be big, could be small, could be about your specific store. It could be about your company that’s serving the laundromat industry.

Jordan Berry [00:02:19]:
Any kind of announcement or press release, we want to hear about it and share it with the industry. Awesome. Okay. Another article that came across my desk this week is about a laundromat attendance lawsuit for claiming retaliatory. Retaliatory termination. And this looks like it’s going to be upheld. You can read all about sort of what happened. It involved an injury and the injury sort of snowballed and it led to this woman being let go or fired, I guess, from the laundromat.

Jordan Berry [00:03:01]:
The reason I wanted to bring it up is because, listen, our industry has traditionally been very light on employees. There’s more and more of us who are starting to get more on the service side of the business. Once you sort of venture into that or even just a fully attended laundromat, you’re starting to add more and more employees. Maybe you’re scaling up to multiple locations. Right. More employees are coming on board. It’s very important that we understand and any management tiers that we’re employing understands employee laws. Because again, this is not something that traditionally we’ve had to be all that cognizant of, you know, in our industry, because we really haven’t employed a whole lot of employees traditionally in our businesses.

Jordan Berry [00:03:45]:
So again, as we scale our portfolios up, as we venture into the service side of the business, as we run fully attended laundromats with longer hours and those kinds of things, we’re adding more employees to our payroll. So that HR concern is there. And I think that that HR piece is very underserved. Now that I’m talking about and saying this out loud, maybe we need to do full on podcast episode on HR and everything you need to know, HR wise, if you’ve got employees. Because, you know, this, this lawsuit is. This is no joke. This is, you know, something that’s happening to this laundromat owner. And there’s some serious allegations, including discriminatory termination, retaliatory termination, hostile work environment, failure to accommodate, and unpaid wages.

Jordan Berry [00:04:34]:
So pretty serious stuff. We want to make sure that we are aware of how to handle situations. Okay, listen, I’m not sure why this one made the news, but it did. There was a Laundromat customer who overloaded a washing machine with a kilogram of detergent that caused bubbles to flood everywhere. Apparently it took the staff over an hour to clean up. Somebody put it in there in one of the washing machines at the laundromat. The bubbles overflowed everywhere. And, you know, to me, it kind of Sounds just like a normal Thursday.

Jordan Berry [00:05:11]:
I’m not sure why this made the news, but there’s, you know, took them an hour to clean it up and I think the, the customer put their laundry in, put the detergent in, quickly realized what the problem was and maybe out of embarrassment or something else like they, they skipped, they skipped town. Basically, they, they left and left everything for the attendants to clean up. So again, not sure why that was newsworthy, but it was. There was one comment at the very end of the article that I just sort of chuckled at. The owner, who was obviously frustrated by this situation, said, look, it’s not rocket science. Is a quote. Look, it’s not rocket science to know how much detergent you need to clean your clothes. So I’m not sure if this is a relatively new owner or not, but I actually think it might be rocket science just based on my experience.

Jordan Berry [00:05:58]:
To know how much detergent to put in a washing machine seems to be very difficult to figure out for a lot of people. So anyway, anyways, I don’t know that there’s any practical takeaway for you. Signage doesn’t seem to work other than maybe training your attendants to keep an eye out for overloading the washing machines with, with detergent. And it doesn’t say if the kilogram of detergent is powder. I’m assuming it’s powder, but that would be crazy if it was liquid. But it doesn’t say. Anyways, let’s jump to the technology side of the business. Is a brand new technology coming out that is using both solar and wind to, to revolutionize the way that people are actually drying their clothes that may or may not replace dryers and laundromats.

Jordan Berry [00:06:49]:
And that technology is called a clothesline. And it’s been around for a really long time. Okay, that was my attempt at a joke. There’s really no, there’s no getting around. It’s just not a funny joke. And I was talking about clothesline, solar and wind power. I don’t know, dude, I. I’m struggling here.

Jordan Berry [00:07:06]:
If you’ve got a joke that I can insert next week to not look foolish in front of my friends, send it to me [email protected] I would greatly appreciate just struggling over here with the jokes. I’m just struggling. All right, all right, let’s wrap up this news with just one stat that I saw that was pretty crazy. You know, in California, San Francisco. San Francisco tends to, you know, sometimes demonstrate some trends. So it’s. This is just something to keep an eye on industry wide, I don’t personally think this is indicative of anything other than San Francisco city politics. However, one concerning statistic about San Francisco and laundromats is that between 2011 and 2021, one in three laundromats shut down in the city of San Francisco.

Jordan Berry [00:08:06]:
So one out of every three, 33% of all laundromats in the city of San Francisco shut down in the 10 years between 2011 and 20. Again, I think that a lot of this is policy driven and also some gentrification stuff happening. I think, I think there’s, you know, some nuances and some specifics about San Francisco, specifically about why this is the case. However, just always something to keep an eye on. One of the questions I get asked all the time is, is laundromats, are laundromats still a good business to be in? Are they going to be around for the long haul? I always answer, yes, I do believe, and I still believe that this is a great business to be in and that it’s going to be around for the long term. However, I do think the industry is changing, we need to keep up with that. But when I see a stat that 33% of laundromats disappear in a decade from a major metropolitan area, I want to take note of that. Now I also know that I’ve had quite a few consulting clients who’ve called from the San Francisco area.

Jordan Berry [00:09:07]:
There’s actually a, a vacancy tax for commercial real estate that is, that is implemented by the city. So landlords actually get taxed extra for not filling a vacancy in their space. And there are vacant laundromats out there. So something to keep an eye out on where you can sort of make a pitch maybe to one of these landlords if, if the location is a viable business and get the at least the very first parts of the quote unquote free laundromat. Now I have other places where I share about the free laundromat over there, I think it’s the riskiest way to get in the business. However, you may be able to get a foot in the door by looking for those locations where landlords are being taxed because the laundromat closed down and in the space is vacant, they haven’t been able to fill it. So that might be some leverage for you if you’re in the San Francisco area to pick up a location, put in some new equipment, turn it around. Again, lots of nuances there.

Jordan Berry [00:10:04]:
I don’t recommend doing that for your first time on your own. But if you’re experienced, or if you’ve got someone experienced in your corner, like somebody on the laundromat resource consulting team, for example, might be a good fit for you. Okay. All right. We’re going to keep an eye on that and keep an eye on that in other metropolitan areas. If you see any articles about that, feel free to send them over again. Newsaunderesource.com and that’s it. That’s a roundup for news around the industry today.

Jordan Berry [00:10:30]:
We’ll see you next week with all the latest and greatest from the laundromat industry coming right at you. Peace.