Campus laundry could be much more efficient.

Currently, while it is only an eight-quarter process to completely wash and dry any one load, it costs much more in time and frustration (especially if we calculate a Loyola student’s time to be worth minimum wage). Naturally, students tend to do laundry on weekends, which means that on weekends, the probability of finding a machine is incredibly low.  

Lugging laundry baskets filled to the brim with procrastination down 11 floors only to find no available machines is not efficient or fun.

That being said, what can we do about it? How are other universities improving their laundry efficiency? Let’s start across the street.

Tulane supplements its machines with an optional laundry service that students can pay for. The service does your laundry for you and, depending on the tier you pay for, also does your dry cleaning. Contracting with an outside company, as did Tulane, would greatly alleviate the stress put on the laundry room. As music majors must own tuxedos and business majors must own suits, the dry cleaning option provided by such a third party service would be worth its weight in gold.

Much of the laundry room stress, however, is created because most students don’t return to their machines to empty them once their laundry is done. This creates all sorts of uncomfortable situations. As we all have better things to do than laundry, it is very common to move someone’s clothes out of a machine so that it can be used. This process is at best inconvenient and possibly traumatizing. (No one likes touching anyone else’s underwear, no matter how “clean” it is)

Other schools, such as Trinity University, California Polytechnic State University and the University of Virginia, implement laundry-alert systems to address just this problem.  

Trinity University has a website that lets you know what machines, in which buildings, are free and emails you when your laundry is done. California Polytechnic State University’s laundry-alert system can both text as well as email these same notifications.  

Laundry-alert systems such as these allows all laundry resources across all buildings to be maximized, and also combat the problem of people leaving their laundry in their machines for ridiculous lengths of time. It is not that Loyola doesn’t have enough laundry machines, but rather that the system is inefficient.

Students have to do laundry, (the only possible alternatives being not washing or purchasing incredible amounts of clothing), and it should be as streamlined as possible. It isn’t necessary to go as far as Davidson College, which does all of their students’ laundry for free, but it is necessary to do something.

Less time fretting about folded corners on your dollar bills necessarily means more time elsewhere. For this example, let’s say more time studying. Keeping with that logic, revising the laundry system leads to better performance and thus higher grades. Solving small problems like how we do laundry can mean big differences. Whether it saves a student from having a horrible day, or gives a student more time to study, efficiency in the laundry room is worth it–dry cleaning would be nice too.