Doug’s Dime: Making Clean Money

Thanks to social media influencers shilling the business as a get-rich-quick situation, laundromats have become a trendy investment. The process of actually running a coin-operated laundry is slightly more hands-on than a TikTok might illustrate, but the content does great on social, so, much like vending machines a few years ago, the entrepreneurial side of the internet has convinced itself that fortunes are made one quarter at a time. There are roughly 30,000 laundromats in the United States and the business has stayed relatively flat for some time; a small location might change hands for $300,000, a large one for $3 million, and most are still mom-and-pops that average a 24 percent profit margin, according to the industry group.

John Keilman, The Wall Street Journal