Does your laundromat have metro area parking problems?

 Well, only one of my mats had essentially no parking. My others did have parking lots.

The one with no parking was able to survive and succeed because the area was SO densely populated (think Manhattan level of denseness), that everyone in that area walked with shopping carts to go shopping. The mat was literally surrounded by huge apt houses.... some of them 27 stories high. Still, if that mat had decent parking, I believe it would have done much better!

Problems with customers walking.... if they had to walk more than 3 blocks, even with shopping carts, the number of people coming would quickly die off. Bad weather kept them away as well. The good news for that mat.... there were SO many people living even just within 3 blocks, that we did pretty darn well. Even with apartment houses that had decent laundry rooms.

Also, a strange but good phenomenon.... we sold nylon laundry bags with our name, logo, address, etc on them. For some subconscious reason, which I believe has to do with people's desire to be neat and orderly, nearly 100% of the customers would use the laundry bag to line their shopping carts and place the bag in their cart with our name and logo on the bag facing forward in the cart! So we essentially ended up with people coming and going in our busy shopping area with their own little "billboards" advertising our mat. 

 
If we saw a new customer coming in with a shopping cart, we would give them the bags at half price (my cost). I wanted as many "billboards" out on the street as possible.

My laundry room competitors made 2 mistakes that gave my business a really nice surge in business:

1. They replaced their old hard mounts with soft mounts. New customers came pouring into my mat complaining about "not being able to see any water" in them.
2. They switched to a card system and new customers came in to my mat complaining about the cards.

Let's also add that not only do 99% of mats need parking, but it better be FREE parking! If they have to pay for parking, even just a small amount, I think it’s a turnoff for a lot of people.