As exam turmoil hits its peak mid-semester, students may find themselves strapped for time to do their laundry. Most of them do their own laundry using dormitory laundry machines. For an additional fee, some choose to use the laundry service provided by Brown Student Agencies.
The washers and dryers in each building are handled by ASI/Mac-Gray Campus Laundry Solutions, with which the University started working in 2012, said Richard Hilton, associate director of administrative services for the Office of Residential Life.
“They’re experts — it’s what they do. (Laundry is) the service that they’re set up to provide,” Hilton added. Representatives of the company come to campus three days a week to service and inspect the machines. When a washer or dryer breaks, it is reported to ResLife by either Mac-Gray inspectors, the card readers on the machines or the students using the machines.
“Our biggest voice is usually from the students — which is great, because we’re not in every single room every single week,” Hilton said.
Each use of a washer or dryer costs $1.50 per load, a price that has risen $0.25 since the University began its new contract with Mac-Gray in 2012. The money collected is used for the contract with Mac-Gray, water, electricity and maintenance of the machines. Revenues and costs associated with the laundry machines are confidential, Hilton said.
BSA’s laundry service is a result of collaboration with ResLife and an outside company, E&R Cleaners.
Between 200 and 300 students currently use BSA’s laundry service, said Howard Carter ’16, executive director of BSA. .
Records of BSA’s contract with E&R Cleaners go back as far as the 2000-2001 academic year, but Carter said that BSA and E&R Cleaners began a relationship prior to that, though he wasn’t sure of the exact date the partnership began.
BSA started offering a laundry service based on student demand. Seeing that other campuses in the Ivy League offered a wash-dry-fold service for their students, BSA believed that a large number of Brown students would appreciate the same service, Carter said.
E&R and BSA both receive a portion of the revenue collected from the laundry service. The portion that BSA receives covers the “logistical and legal challenges” that BSA faces and also goes toward other student services, such as the Underground Coffee Shop.
“BSA is a nonprofit student group, and it aims to offer products and services that the students need and to use the revenues from those products and services to give back in some way,” he said.
The program has succeeded in achieving its goal of making life easier for students, Carter said.
“Students … seem to really enjoy the service. We’ve had stable membership and usage of the service for a long time. … We don’t get a lot of complaints,” Carter said.
Adam White ’18, who has used the service his freshmen and sophomore years, provided a mixed review of it. While the service does make doing laundry easier, it is also inconsistent in its pick-up and drop-off times, he said.
“(The service) is really expensive, and they don’t pick up (the laundry) as much as they did last year,” White said. “They’re supposed to pick up Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but they don’t actually do that. It’s a flawed process.”
