I believe laundromat owners benefit by walking in the customer’s shoes and seeing things from a new perspective.

That’s especially true when it comes to payment. 

Sadly, the customer experience gets downplayed in laundry’s polarizing card versus coin debate, which centers more on those behind the machines than in front.

The typical first-timer setting foot inside a loyalty card-only store obtains and loads their plastic by navigating ten steps at the kiosk before moving on.

It’s all covered in a two-minute Facebook video by one of the top card-op chains. Here’s the procedure in a nutshell…

1) Select language

2) Choose to get new card

3) Enter name, phone number and zip code 

4) Accept/decline to receive messages

5) Verify phone number

6) Retrieve and enter code

7) Select cash or debit/credit payment method

8) Insert bills or perform bank card transaction at reader

9) Remove stored-value card

10) Acknowledge non-refundable funds and card replacement fee

On the flip side, you won’t find any how-to videos for coin. After all, nobody needs training to

1) Insert bills and

2) Remove coins.

It turns out stored-value loyalty card has five times more steps than coin just to get started. 

The card store’s aptly named pay station comes at a cost to most consumers. Before strolling down the wash aisle they’ll likely fork over a fee for the privilege of handling the laundry’s in-house plastic — something unheard of at coin-ops and cashless token-ops.

The learning curve

Fast forward to machinery. Loyalty card customers now come face-to-face with an unfamiliar payment device that doesn’t quite resemble what they’re accustomed to at the grocery or department store checkout. For those needing help, it’s probably best to take a stroll and see an attendant. 

Coin pay on the other hand doesn’t have a learning curve. There’s no mistaking the universally-recognized vertical inlet slot. People from all walks of life intuitively know how to use it and don’t hunt down staff for a lesson.

The numbers game

Now the final step: Making payment. It’s either insert, swipe or tap for card and drop for coin.

Here’s where card advocates play the numbers game. Their narrative has loyalty customers starting an eight-dollar wash with plastic in a single motion while others plunk in 32 coins. 

News flash: It’s not 32 anymore. That eight-buck front loader runs on only eight coins. 

More machines are fitted to accept dollars today than ever before, saving patrons time by dramatically reducing coin handling.

For decades there’s been a successful stair step progression from nickels to dimes to quarters to dollars. But plastic pay proponents don’t want to talk about that. They prefer the card vs. coin debate stay all about quarters.

Dollar coins are on a roll inside laundries and throughout the general economy. Federal Reserve Bank inventories are steadily declining — down to $809 million from $1.37 billion a decade ago. 

In the last year alone stockpiles dropped $53 million, yet another sign the highest denomination US circulating coin is fueling transactions.

Speed and feed

Coin pay has long been a hallmark of the laundromat customer experience. 

Eighty years ago New Yorkers flocked to the nation’s first storefront self-service laundry and headed straight to the equipment clutching their change.

Today, people still make a beeline for washers and dryers inside thousands of coin-ops across the country to complete payment right then and there. Customers arrive expecting to pay directly at the machine’s point of sale and not be diverted to a kiosk.

Coin means speed and feed. Long gone are the days of filling, pushing and pulling quarter slides twice to satisfy a high-priced front loader.

The format is increasingly automated. Coins count down instantaneously at machines, while changers dispense pre-programmed single or blended denominations with every bill insertion.

Inflation means whole dollar pricing is fast becoming the rule rather than the exception. Stores circulating high denomination dollars allow customers to start machines quickly and efficiently with fewer coins.

Today’s single inlet drop design has low- and high-value coinage collectively entering one slot, eliminating any guesswork as to what goes where.  

Pocket money

At the end of the day it’s the coin-op patron who heads home with leftover cash in their pocket, not loaded onto a piece of plastic.

Let that sink in for a moment. After jumping through hoops and paying a surcharge the loyalty card customer leaves with hard-earned money sitting on an operator’s balance sheet.

Why it’s enough to stop you dead in your tracks whether you’re a customer or yes, even a store owner walking in their shoes.