Recently, I visited my building’s fetid basement laundry room and found, to my unpleasant surprise, that the cost of a single load in the washing machine had increased from $1.20 to $2.00. The dryer prices remain, as of now, unchanged (which somehow makes sense; everyone knows that washing machines are neoliberal energy and dryers are socialists, somehow, despite the fact that only limited areas in the wealthy world have access to them).
The difference of 80 cents in my weekly laundry budget is, all things considered, not a punitive one - if I had the wherewithal, I might go and calculate what kind of percentage increase that is, but I don’t want to, and the calculator you get when you search online is annoying and the buttons are weird and also, it reminds me of being in fourth grade and getting bad grades on quizzes where we mysteriously had to calculate sale prices.
But as I thought about it, the provenance of this change began to fill me with more and more confusion. Presumably there’s some vendor schedule for machines that contract out to buildings and they “keep up with the cost of living” and increase their prices accordingly, as with other goods. Presumably (?), whoever owns my building’s machines (or is building management?) coordinates with some scheduled price increase god in some hideous consulting tower in the sky who manages these things. But why now? Who? What’s the purpose? What does it all mean? In a world where my generation has accumulated less wealth and managed the highest prices for living costs in recent history while also inheriting seemingly-permanently stagnant wages, I find myself in urgent need of answers. Here, in no particular order, are some theories that I pondered while waiting for my load of underwear to finish its spin cycle.
A secret, hidden component of Wall Street derivatives speculation that you’ve never heard of: Big Laundromat, Baby!!! These bros are squeaky clean - with cash! An office of Goldman Sachs castoffs somewhere is spending hours and hours per day meticulously tracking stock and trading prices of laundry soap and faraway companies that manufacture the rusty clunking mold machines that are the only ones I’ve ever seen to exist in communal laundry rooms, snorting lines of powder detergent off their desks while clapping each other on the back and yelling, “We’re killing it! Our fourth quarter bleach projections are immaculate, bro!” They pump and dump the laundry market (LNDRY on the Dow), and then pass down the price increase to the consumer as part of their margin. [Note: I do not understand the stock market.]
A related fantasy: some unbelievably wealthy man, probably from an old money family in New York with the surname Van der Launder, somehow owns every single laundromat and coin laundry machine in America, and the profits all spiral up to him, as they have since the beginning. He primarily spends his time at the family’s Connecticut estate, where he sits all day on a pile of towels, watching surveillance footage from the many corners of his empire. Once in a while, he calls in his handlers. “The minimum wage workers dragging loads of all their earthly possessions to the laundry holes every week look like they’re getting a little too... comfortable!” he growls. Then he smashes a giant red button at the side of his desk and prices all go up 40 to 80 cents, throughout the world.
Luckily, the Covid-19 pandemic is completely over! Joe Biden truly built back better, and now that we have a Democrat in the White House and full Democratic control of Congress, everything has been completely fixed, and voting for the lesser of two evils was all it took. Everyone is vaccinated now, and no one is dying senselessly of an absence of hospital beds, so the economy has, as we all know, completely recovered. In fact, it recovered enough that job availability is going up, and we even finally got to end the enhanced unemployment assistance for the 7.5 million people who lost their jobs, and end the eviction moratorium! People are doing great. Prices are back on the rise, baby! Let’s spend! In this light, it does make sense that consumer prices like laundry would go up. It’s the American thing to do. We have to do our fair share. Plus we got those $1200 checks a while back, so we can afford it.
A team of behavioral economists and social psychologists, probably funded by something called the Free Market Freedom Institute or something of that nature, has gotten federal approval to launch a longitudinal socioeconomic study involving the placement of thousands of small cameras in every coin or card operated laundry machine in America, as well as at public urgent care centers, pharmacies, check cashing places, and dollar stores that sell food. Their goal, in so many words, is to watch people approach the payment area, see that the price has gone immeasurably up for something they simply cannot not purchase, and to gauge their reaction. How much price gouging will people take? How can the idea of benefactors “selling” goods required for life be further indoctrinated into the capitalist psyche? At what point do riots break out, and how can they be prevented? Also, how can cameras be installed with facial and emotion recognition technology that reads this all, so that it can be tracked and billionaires can be alerted when it’s time to descend into their crisis bunkers upon the impending collapse of the economy?
Random accident: guy servicing the machines kicked one in such a way that the price went up through some kind of electronic glitch, and then he had to adjust them to all go up.
All of the above.