My apartment complex uses coinmach cards in the laundromat.
To get started, you have to buy a coinmach card. It’s five dollars, payable only with a five dollar bill. Coinmach keeps two bucks out of that, so for your fiver you get a card worth… three dollars.
Use that three bucks up? Join the club… that will generally get you through a single washer load, and you still have to dry it. Even though you spent five bucks, after you’ve used three, you have to put more money on the card.
Good luck.
Coinmach does not accept singles. Neither does it accept the new tens or twenties (but even if it did, I’d advise against it… more on that later). You really need to use another five dollar bill.
This is in a place where stores close early, and even the ones that are open usually don’t have five dollar bills (those being much in demand… guess why).
But let’s say that you planned ahead. Good. I’m all for that. Life requires planning, especially laundry. You did have the foresight to bring two five dollar bills so you could do a single load of laundry.
You put the first one in and lose two bucks. You stick that coinmach card back in and insert another fiver.
But the dryers will only deduct from your coinmach card in fifty cent intervals. You need to fuck that coinmach card slot about four times before the dryer will even start. But after you’ve gone in and out twice, you usually get this message from the 1980s style LED readout:
“Err.”
Yes, you bought the card for two dollars less than an hour ago. And yes, you did just stick another five bucks on the card. But nonetheless, that coinmach card is now as inert and worthless as a baseball card featuring, say, me.
You go in and out with that card a few more times, hoping it will work because you’ve got a mountain of wet clothes and you don’t have another five dollar bill, and you don’t have a way to get another one until 6am tomorrow morning, and in any case you’re out about seven bucks, and you swear brutally at the dryer, and all the dryer has to say is this:
“It’s not my fault. I’m just a dryer. Err.”
Coinmach has to die. I will be circulating a petition in my building tomorrow. It must accept singles, and it must develop cards durable enough to last through one single cycle of laundry. Or it’s gonna be gone.
Sorry if this is a lame rant… but I’ve fucking had it. Fucking god-damn well by the festering shit of Satan had it. Bad enough things cost too much, worse that some companies (MTA in New York, you’re fucking well next) make it impossible to pay for services.