[ehaskins]

My parents owned laundromats my whole life, and I was being taken along to help install and service laundry equipment when I was pretty young.

Aside, being the one to climb down into the bulkheads in a laundromat is a good inventive to go to college.

I agree the laundry business is changing and probably declining overall, but I think 2005 is a bad baseline.

In the late '90s some laundry equiptment manufacturers put together unreasonable financing deals for building or renovating laundromats. If you see a laundromat from that time that has Maytag or Speed Queen signs out front it was probably built using one of those packages

The financing was sold with revenue or utility saving estimates that were completely out of line with reality, and many of those stores ended up collapsing under the debt and closing within 5-10 years of being built, and so probably had a peak number of them around 2005.

I saw this first hand having helped build then disassemble more than one store in Wisconsin and Illinois.