Wow, I'm never doing my laundry here again. This place is terrible. I've tried hard to avoid using the word "fraud" in this review, because fraud suggests intentional deception and I don't have any proof of this, and suspect that it's just that the owner(s) is/are lazy and don't give a shit, but from the customer's viewpoint, there's really no difference. It's hard to come to any conclusion other then that whoever owns this place is intentionally targeting locals too poor to own a car and who therefore don't have meaningful alternatives for laundromats. I'm not saying that this is the case; I'm just saying it's hard to come to any other conclusion.
Both of the change machines were broken when I got here: one had the "out of service" light flashing, and one simply rejected every single bill I tried to feed in. (There were maybe 14 bills in my wallet, including two fives, a ten, and a twenty, and a wad of ones. The machine didn't take any of them.) You'd think that, at a coin-op laundromat, it would be a no-brainer that the owners would keep at least one change machine working, but apparently this is such a common problem at this place that the regulars just advise new customers to walk across the street to the liquor store and hope they have change.
I needed five washing machines to handle three weeks' worth of laundry for two people, which is about what I expected. But I had to examine twelve machines to find five that (I thought) worked, and some of the non-working ones had fairly subtle problems that weren't obvious until I'd already poured in detergent and loaded laundry into the machine: doors not latching, all coins rejected, etc. No, I didn't lose any money on this basis, except for the value of the detergent I poured in, but my time is valuable, and loading the same pile of clothes into one machine after another in the hope that one will eventually work is a pain in the ass. Of those five apparently working machines, one started the load and ran for the right length of time, but when the clothes came out, they were barely damp and definitely not clean, and had to be run again in a different machine. Of the eight non-working machines in a row of twelve, only two had any indication at all that they were out of order.
Non-working machines seem to be enough of a regular problem that regular customers warned me about driers not to use. None of these driers pointed out by other customers were in any way marked as out of order, though several other dryers had their buttons covered with foil, which (I guess) means "out of order." As I stand here writing this, there's a woman across the laundromat kicking a washer and swearing in Spanish, so I take it this problem is not unique to me.
Tried five driers. Three of them defaulted to low heat when the start button was pushed even if another temperature had been selected before that point, and the same three silently switched to low heat at some point during the cycle. Two of the driers I tried apparently do not heat at all, even when set to high heat, and another one heats, but does not tumble. None of these dryers is in any way marked as non-functional; they just waste your money and time. All in all, I must have spent about eight bucks extra re-doing laundry that didn't get washed or didn't get dried the first time I used a machine because the machine happily eats money and appears to work, but doesn't do anything productive. Moreover, what should have been a two-hour-or-so trip to the laundromat stretched out to more than four hours while I played "guess which of these machines that takes your money actually works."
This place is bad and its owners should feel bad. read more