Whom to Outsource Your Laundry to: Laundromat or Online Laundry

Outsourcing is the order of the day. Activities such as grocery shopping, home repairs, educational tutoring, taxi service, etc. that formerly used to be done by oneself, are nowadays outsourced to agencies that do the job for you. Basically, there are two reasons for this recent shift to outsourcing: people have very little time and inclination to do routine and monotonous chores by themselves, and outsourcing agencies have the expertise to do the jobs in those fields.

Laundry service nowadays is no exception to the outsourcing phenomenon. Gone are the days when you had domestic help to wash your clothes for you, and nor do you have the time or inclination to wash them in a laundry machine yourself.

So, there are two choices before oneself when it comes to doing the laundry: use a laundromat service, or an online laundry service.

You could use a laundromat service if you don’t have a washing machine and/or dryer at home. Then you could outsource your garments to a laundromat. In this method, you will need to make a phone call to the agency and have them pick up your clothes. Or you could take them yourself to the laundromat and place the order there. The laundromat route has several disadvantages, though. Making a phone call to the laundromat is easier said than done. Very often a busy laundromat or one that is short-staffed, will put your call on hold, and make you listen to music you are not interested in, or subject you to boring general or promotional information. Laundromats remain closed on certain days of the week, or public holidays, and hence may not be able to provide the service when you need it most. During festive seasons, laundromats may not accept your order; and even if they do, may not return your order on the stipulated due date. 

Then they give miscellaneous excuses for not being able to execute your order, such as labour shortage, power shortage, lack of chemicals, and so on. Taking your laundry to the laundromat yourself is an obvious drain on your time and energy, compounded with the other disadvantages listed above. These disadvantages of outsourcing your laundry to a laundromat need to be kept in mind, even if the service is your neighborhood laundromat.

Online outsourcing of laundry takes care of several of the disadvantages of the laundromat discussed above. The biggest advantage of online laundry is that you neither have to phone the agency nor undertake the hassle of personally transporting your clothes to the laundromat. You can place the order on your mobile or laptop from the comfort of your home or office or wherever you are, and at your own time. You can order the pickup of your laundry at your convenient time and location; and you can choose the delivery date, time and location yourself. You can select the type of cleaning you want, and the application will also recommend the cleaning method after you key in the nature of the fabrics of your laundry. 

You can choose from a variety of payment options based on your convenience. Many online laundry services operate on the aggregator model: they will offer a choice of laundromats to execute your order. However, there is one disadvantage to be considered: since an online service is faceless, one does not know the quality of the service offered. Hence, one has to rely on the online reviews of the service, or on word-of-mouth reports from those who have used the service. Given that such reports are satisfactory, there is little to beat an online laundry service.