Beer and Economic Postulates

Like most other twenty-somethings, when I first moved to New York I did my own laundry. Doing the wash was in many ways a continuation of a ritual that had started in college (ignoring those times when I would drive two and a half hours back home for something or other and just happened to throw my wash in the car). In my case, doing laundry has always involved heading out to the laundromat, dropping a bunch of quarters in the machines, and reading a book while the industrial strength, side-loading washing machine did its thing. (Side note: I stopped doing my laundry in the dorms after an unfortunate blue-pen-in-the-wash-incident. Though it was completely my own fault, I decided that the extra room provided at the Wash and Blow downtown would lessen the chance the same debacle occurring twice.) I continued this pattern of quarter dropping and reading during my first year in New York, despite the fact that the closest laundromat to my apartment was three and a half blocks away, requiring me to use one of the incredibly manly wire-mesh carts that old ladies like to use to push around their groceries and small dogs. (Have I mentioned how awesome living in Midtown East was?)

When I moved to the East Village, we happened to move in to an apartment directly across the street from a laundromat. Compared to laundry treks resembling the Oregon Trail at my previous apartment, having a place across the street to do my wash seemed like quite the coup. A night soon after moving in, however, I met up with my friend James at the bar. When he asked me how I liked my new place – after cursing me for the near-heart attack he had helping me move in – I mentioned a number of things. In addition to the proximity of fun bars, the young feeling of the neighborhood, and the availability of cheap food, I told him about the laundromat. My mention of a place where one can manually do their own laundry caused James to admit that, mainly out of laziness, he had been dropping off his dirty clothes to have them cleaned by a nice Chinese family for several months in a row. He claimed that he did not feel good about this fact, but it was what he had been doing, and hey, maybe it was more cost effective anyways.

As we began to chuckle heartily at this idea, we looked at each other and realized “wait a minute, what if it IS more cost effective?” Clearly, we were on the cusp of a huge breakthrough in both guilt-therapy and the economics of twenty-something New Yorkers if we could prove our newly formed theorem true. Suddenly, doing one’s own laundry would be a choice not a chore, and perhaps one that was ultimately costing people like us cash that could be better spent on booze and pizza!

With the issue broached, the only thing for two enterprising young graduates to do was order a round a shots (with some beers for good measure), take out a pad and paper, and do a little algebra. After estimating the number of pounds of laundry an average load of wash contained, we multiplied that by the cost in quarters of a doing the laundry ourselves and compared it to what James was typically charged per pound by his laundromat of choice. (I’d insert the exact formula here, but it was way too complex to repeat. I’m not sure if I even fully understood it, it was so amazing.) After all of this hard work and math, and only a slight amount of lubrication (read: at least five rounds each), James was still on the losing end. There was no way we could claim that having the (insert appropriate ethnicity here) people down the street clean our clothes for us was cheaper than doing it ourselves. As defeat seemed to be closing in upon us, and our quest to justify having someone else do basic “living on your own/growing up” shit for us appeared to be dying a cruel death, an old cliché came to mind. What if, as pretentious Wall Street types have liked to say since at least the Bronze Age, time really is money? If this maxim of self-involved work-a-holics and blow-hard bosses everywhere was true, then perhaps all we needed to do was to tweak our Nobel Prize worthy formula to account for the fact that we use our time doing laundry – and that our time isn't free.

As we debated the finer points of this theory, it became clear that other people, namely our respective employers, most definitely did not think that our time was free. Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe, the illustrious law firm where I spent my days while trying to find some better place to work, not only thought my time was worth money, but apparently thought it was worth a metric shit-ton of money – the firm had a habit of charging clients around a hundred and twenty dollars an hour for my third-rate legal assistant skills. As for James’ midtown financial firm, suffice it to say that clients that have him as part of their investment team aren’t getting his services for free either. Armed with this new-found realization (and a giant tub of popcorn from the movie theater next door) our theorem virtually proved itself. We soon realized that doing laundry ourselves was definitely costing us cold hard cash, and that we would be much better served by dropping our laundry off and then picking it up when it was done. (Economists might say that we correctly factored in Opportunity Cost to our equation to make it work. We said “whatever, this is awesome!”)

The hard work done, the next day I took my laundry down to the aforementioned easy-access laundromat and, instead of doing it myself, dropped it off. Liberated from the monotony of sticking around to actually supervise the cleaning and drying, and guilt-free about it thanks to the knowledge that dropping it off was better for me than doing it myself, I set off to attack the day. (And by "attack the day," I mean I "went to work" – but still.) Since that day, I haven’t done my own laundry in New York. Instead, I drop it off with the nice family across the street (in my case Ukrainian), and while I sometimes have a sneaking suspicion that clothing isn’t the only thing they launder over there, I am still more than happy to give them twenty or so dollars every two weeks to have them take care of my clothes. And what do I do with this extra freedom I have? These extra two hours or so per week when I am not shackled to a washer and dryer? Whatever I damn well please. And that, for my money, is always time well spent.