Sophomore looks to bring laundry service to campus

The life of the average college student seems to get more hectic every week, as students run all over campus on their way to classes, meetings, practice, and work. With this kind of schedule, many students count themselves lucky if they find time to eat and sleep, much less do their laundry. That is why Wildcat Washers, a newly formed student-run laundry service, hopes that you will leave the dirty work to them.

Wildcat Washers will pick up, wash, dry, fold, and deliver student's clothes all on the same day-and they won't have to make a single trip down to the laundry room. This UNH business is the brainchild of sophomore John Dodd, and from what he explains, the process is fairly simple.

The process will begin when a student pays for a "laundry plan" that will be charged by the pound. The paying student will then be issued a laundry bag that has been personalized with their name, dorm and room number. The student will also be provided with pick-up and delivery times for their clothes every week. Each week, their plan will be deducted with the number of pounds of laundry they choose to have washed.

Each dorm will have a specific day designated for laundry pick- up, so when it is that hall's corresponding day of the week, students will leave their laundry outside their doors. Wildcat Washers will then pick it up and take it to a professional cleaner to be washed, dried and folded.

Afterward, the service will pick up the clothes from the cleaners and deliver them back to the students' rooms later that same day. Wildcat Washers will roll over any unused pounds from one semester to next, as well as offer smaller laundry plans, in the event that a student run sout early and needs just enough to get them to the end of the semester.  

The goal of the service will be to eliminate the hassle that doing laundry in a dorm inevitably brings.

"No more hauling clothes up and down the stairs to the laundry room where you sometimes have to take other peoples clothes out of the machines or wait for a machine to free up," Dodd said. "No more worrying about putting Cat's Cache on your card."

Wildcat Washers is scheduled to begin in Fall 2010, and while it's just Dodd running things so far, he plans to hire employees when the 2010-11 school year starts up. Dodd is even offering a discount to students if they sign up for the fall semester before August 15. But will students really pay for a service that they could be doing themselves?

According to Dodd, absolutely.

"What we are really selling is the convenience," Dodd said. "We're completely hassle free and offering a service that comes right to your room."

Students on campus, however, have some logistical concerns.

"I think it's a really great idea, but I don't think it would work out very well," senior Brooke Pearson said. "I'm a strong supporter of students learning life skills for themselves."
Junior Tasha Staples agreed.

"I wear a lot of different types of clothes that can't really be washed and dried that quickly or they shrink, so a same day washing and drying service probably won't work for me," she said.

There is also the issue of how safe your clothes will be while their left outside your door.     
"I don't think it's a very good idea, because if you leave clothes outside of your door, people might take them," senior Chris Glenn said. "[The students] can be untrustworthy and sometimes like to steal stuff just because it's fun."

Despite these concerns, junior Greg Mili is confident that this service could work.
"[Wildcat Washers] sounds extremely convenient, and it could create competition with the university that could cause them to drop their prices," Mili said.