Editor's Notebook: Do Your Laundry

“Never did laundry at home? Why start now?” HSA Cleaners asks on its website. At first glance the slogan appears to be a rhetorical question. But while HSA Cleaners might not expect an answer, there are plenty of answers to give.

First, whether or not college students would like to accept it, laundry is a metaphor for responsibility. The act of cleaning your own clothes shows that you are capable of taking care of yourself. Doing laundry is just like bathing. As a baby, it is impossible to bathe yourself, but as you get older, staying clean becomes your own responsibility. Most sleep-away summer camps provide a laundry service, because even as junior high school students, many of us are not responsible enough to keep our wardrobes clean.

Some people might argue that just by wearing clean clothing you show how responsible you are. It doesn’t matter, these people might argue, who actually cleans the clothes, and by paying HSA Cleaners, they are being responsible. Granted, these people will not be trotting around in stained T-shirts and recycled panties, but they seem to be missing an integral part of the process. There are a lot of responsibilities you can dodge with a wad of cash, but to actually take the time and effort to do the laundry yourself, or to carry it all the way back home on Thanksgiving, shows a true acceptance of responsibility.

Second, doing laundry unites college students from different schools and different times. Laundry is an integral part of college life (like class, pizza and alcohol). We all know what it’s like to go to class, eat pizza, and do laundry. Students of the previous generation did their laundry as well, which is why they can tease us about wearing wrinkled shirts.

But not only is laundry an integral part of college life, it is also an integral part of the college learning experience. College is where our parents learned how much detergent is needed for a small- to medium-size load. If we don’t take the opportunity to learn these skills today, our clothing may smell like detergent well into our later years.

“Why start now?” Another reason is purely financial. HSA charges much more per year than doing laundry yourself would cost. The HSA “Basic Plan” costs $375 a year, and buys you “1 Drop-off per week” (i.e. two total loads per week, one white and one color). With prices of $1 per washer load and $.75 per dryer load, and an average cost of detergent approximately $.31 per load (that’s 16 loads of Tide for $4.99 at CVS), you could do your own laundry for $3.62 a week. Since there are 30 weeks in school year, you could pay as little as $108.60 for the same amount of clean clothing as the $375 HSA plan.

These figures do not even account for linens. For HSA to clean your linens on their “Basic Plan” (1 exchange per week) will run you $190 for the year. By doing the same cleaning on your own, you would only be set back $61.80.

What about all the time spent doing laundry? Isn’t that wasted time worth more than a few measly dollars a week? The fact of the matter is that without HSA, you will spend time doing laundry. But the time is not wasted time. The laundry room is an unbelievable place to meet people; if you’re loading washing machines next to someone, you two already have something in common, and you always have an easily accessible ice-breaker: “Is this whites or colors?” I met some great friends doing laundry, and I got to know some friends even better as we talked and folded together. Also, if you’re not into meeting people, or there’s no one around when you clean your clothes, the laundry room can be the perfect place to read, do homework or get some studying done.

“Never did laundry at home?” Start now.