Doing laundry in China

[confucius]

For those of you from America, remember when laundries in the West were all run by Chinese immigrants? My high school football coach used to say "I want you guys to knock 'em all the way to the Chinese laundry" to make us hit our opponents harder. The term "Chinese laundry" was sort of a catchy phrase for a while. Of course nowadays the Koreans have taken over that business in America but in Hong Kong you can still find decent laundries on every residential block. Best of all, they all charge by weight if you're just cleaning ordinary clothes and towels and such.

In China most laundries still charge by the piece, not by the pound. This is starting to change, yet the pace of change has been slower than melting frozen molasses. Some enlightened laundries in the Pearl River Delta region have followed their Hong Kong cousin's example, but up north it's still difficult to find a laundry that does not charge the same rate as a 4 star hotel.

This is changing too, but few people are on top of this topic like Confucius is. When I spent six months in Shenyang a couple years ago, I had to search a long time to find one laundry that would charge by weight instead of by each dadgum sock and underwear. In Beijing last year I finally found a wonderful new chain of laundries with a branch on the southwest corner of Peking University that provides the same drop off-pick up service that I get in Hong Kong so easily.

However if you ask hotel concierges and other laundries in Beijing and northern China they will still tell you that no such place exists. In fact, more than one dared to argue with Confucius that such a practice (charging by weight) only exists in the West and that I should adjust to China's conditions.

Don't let anybody, especially competing laundries, tell you that this is a foreign concept in China. I predict that more and more laundries will start charging by weight or go out of business and this change shall take effect rapidly in 2004.

The revolution has begun! Foreigners doing laundry in China unite! We shall overcome! Yaaaaaaaaaaa!

[Quest]

By weight? I thought they all charge by loads. You can fit as many clothes in as possible per load, then you put some coins in, the machine fills up with water, you add detergent, then it spins, and then ........ you are done. If you want it to spin again, you need to put more coins in. Chinese tend to do their laundries at home. Chinese washers are slim and small, and they are relatively cheap. The ones used in say America are bulky metal monsters.

[skylee]

Not the coin-operated thing, but laundry service. In HK, you take your clothes to the laundry shop in a plastic bag. Put it on the scale there and the cleaning service is charged according to the weight. The shop takes your bag and gives you a receipt. Then you can come back several hours later or the next day to collect your clothes, all washed and nicely folded and put into a new bag.

I know some people can't live without such service.

[cuthbert]

if u hire a nanny,everything will be on track. :o

[confucius]

I prefer professional laundering rather than some Anhui ayi's handwashing.