Sparkle has the same cute, arts and crafts type aesthetic Skylar laundromats use, but Skylar refined it and ran with it more. It seems more authentic coming from a mom and pop than a burgeoning chain though.
Sparkle doesn't keep the late night hours I favor for the chore of washing and drying my clothes. I have seen them with the front door still unlocked and the open sign lit up past their posted hours though.
Some of the machines are pretty temperamental. I couldn't get one to switch to whites after I'd already added detergent and oxyclean pods. I was just going to let it go through as colors until finally on the tenth try on the button my cycle registered. There was also one dryer I had to move my clothes from as no amount of button pressing could get it to start. Fortunately my quarters were good for the lower dryer as well if I switched to that one so I wasn't out fifty cents.
Sparkle does have an awesome sit down video console loaded with like a couple dozen old school Atari games. I played some Frogger on a couple of visits here and some Ms. Pac-Man on one, but again this thing is testy. Only one of the two coin slots works. Fortunately you can get your coins back and the games only cost a quarter in 2024.
Sparkle also has a Spider-Man pinball machine. I was having trouble with that as well. It nabbed a quarter from me without registering it had received it. With some vigorous jabbing of the coin return button I managed to get it to eject a Canadian dime some moron had stuffed in there but not my quarter. I brought it up to the front desk and told the guy my story.
With more prodding of the coin return button as well as unplugging it and plugging it back in he managed to free my quarter and get Spidey up and running. Sort of. I was quickly back up at the attendants counter upon discovering only one of the three flippers worked. He returned for my demonstration. "Well," he said "you can just play it like this or I can give you your fifty cents back." I was taken aback by such a stunning ignorance about the game of pinball. I told him I wasn't about to just let the ball drain anytime it came down on the entire left side of the field of play, not even getting into the smaller point of losing the fun factor and potential points of the upper flipper.
So he gives me my fifty cents back but here's what really galls me : I was there for awhile longer finishing my loads and he never unplugged the game or put an OUT OF ORDER sign on it. My reaction should have let him understand that game was unplayable and that lack of attention to detail is just gonna carry over to their bread and butter, those fussy washers and dryers.
So Sparkle lost its shine with me and I don't expect I'll be back. I will always remember I was there during the great fire at the dispensary/ vape store way over at 15 Mile and Groesbeck when massive amounts of vape cartridges and other volatile materials were exploding for over an hour. I could hear it from the parking lot here and was wondering if it was a distant approaching thunderstorm or somehow fireworks in March. Nothing to really do with this place but that was really something. read more