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It is fairly common to not have an in-house washer/dryer in apartment complexes in the various high-population-density areas I've lived in the US; but it is als

It is fairly common to not have an in-house washer/dryer in apartment complexes in the various high-population-density areas I've lived in the US; but it is also pretty common for such apartment complexes to have a shared laundry room on the premises somewhere. These shared laundry rooms usually have a card system now where you can use a credit card to put value on a card that you insert into the washer/dryer to start it up. I haven't used quarters for laundry in a decade. I'm sure YMMV depending upon location, in older cities like in the Northeast (I grew up in Boston but haven't lived there since 1995) I suspect things are probably different.

lh7777 12y ago
Yep, shared laundry is very common in older buildings and multi-family houses, but I've never seen such a place with a card system. They all took quarters. Who's going to bother installing an electronic system when you have one set of machines and 3 apartments? I had to deal with coin-operated in-building laundry for years (mostly in New England), and it's definitely terrible when you realize you _have_ to do laundry tonight but you're out of quarters and it's too late to go to a bank. Time to start knocking on doors or making friends with the guy at 7-11. I definitely thought about (and searched for) a service like this, but as everyone else has said, paying a 50% premium on quarters is tough to swallow. I'd have paid 10-20%, though. (But now that I have in-unit laundry, I'll never go back to shared if I can help it.)