Should I get into laundry pickup and delivery?

Is wash and fold on the decline?  Are customers still willing to drive to the laundromat for wash and fold service or are they demanding that the laundromat picks up the laundry?  Is this Blockbuster vs Netflix part deux? 

Take a look at actual numbers from a laundromat doing 1.5 MILLION DOLLARS in wash and fold per year and see the overall trends of wash and fold drop off versus pickup and delivery.   

Show notes

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Transcript

If you're doing wash and fold, you need to be doing pickup and delivery. And here's why:

At our family's laundromat, SuperSuds, we made over one point five million dollars in wash and fold over the course of the year, and it was primarily through pickup and delivery.

Let's take a look at what is happening to the in-store wash and fold business. We went from just two years ago, from six hundred wash and fold orders per month to three hundred and seventy-five wash and fold orders per month. That's a thirty-eight percent decrease. That's big.

If we were living or dying by wash and fold in-store drop-off, we would be in a precarious situation. This is like Blockbuster versus Netflix. Yes, Blockbuster did not want to adapt. They did not want to do online delivery. They wanted people to go to the store and pick up and drop off their videos. And guess what? People don't want to do that. It's inconvenient.

While our wash and fold in-store drop-off has dropped by about five thousand dollars a month and is on a downward trajectory, it doesn't matter. You know why? Because pickup and delivery is more than making up for the loss.

In just two years, our pickup and delivery has grown by over forty thousand dollars a month. And that's just pickup and delivery. If we were just doing in-store wash and fold, we would be like, "Uh-oh, what is happening?" Because we're doing pickup and delivery, our growth is going up and up and up and up. And that's the trend.

We're getting a whole bunch of new leads of people who never expected to get into pickup and delivery, probably didn't want to. But they know if they don't do pickup and delivery, their competition will, and they're gonna take their business. It's easier to keep your existing business by providing convenience such as pickup and delivery than it is to lose your customers and try getting them back in the future.

I see twenty twenty-four as a bright, bright future for pickup and delivery because that's where the money is at.