Apps, rising rents take laundromats to the NYC cleaners. Coin-operated laundries are becoming all washed up.

Crain's New York reports:

New York City used to be a town where recent college grads would move and assert their newfound independence by paying their own rent, cooking their own meals and taking their clothes to the laundromat. But now the suds are getting outsourced, and self-service laundromats are in a state of decline. The number of coin-operated laundries licensed by the city was 2,570 as of February—a 10% drop from a decade ago, according to a Crain's analysis of data from the Department of Consumer Affairs. Manhattan, where rising retail rents from Harlem to SoHo have pushed out many longtime businesses, counts fewer than 400.

Laundries' market share is being eroded by on-demand services, where local startups such as FlyCleaners and Cleanly offer pickup and delivery at the touch of an app. The number of businesses that accept laundry for off-site washing or dry cleaning has increased in the past decade by 9%, to 1,744.

"Laundry is an industry that was slow to catch up to where the rest of the economy has gone," said Tom Harari, who co-founded Cleanly two years ago as a way to avoid schlepping his dirty duds from his Park Slope, Brooklyn, brownstone to the corner laundromat. "You're going to save money by doing wash-and-fold on your own, but the question is, how much do you value your time? We want to save people time and let them do the things they love to do."

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