The Price of Laundry

Cold weather. Warm clothes and snow-skiing attire. Two-week vacation. One large duffle bag. I planned on doing laundry once during the trip. I packed accordingly.

My first week we had a washer at the house, but no dryer. I was told I would have to buy my own detergent if I wanted to wash my clothes. Hanging all my clothes from a line, in the winter, just seemed like a major operation. After some deliberation I decided I would just wait until I got to the hotel and do a load of laundry there. It was a nice hotel; maybe they even have free laundry service.

I arrived at the hotel on Saturday afternoon with a bag full of mostly dirty clothes. I went to the front desk to ask them about laundry service. He made a quick call and then told me that regular service didn’t resume until Monday and if I wanted my clothes washed immediately it would cost 50% more. I must have had a puzzled look on my face, so he explained.

“For example if a shirt costs 4000 to wash normally, now it would be 6000.”

What? 6000? I understood 50% more. I do teach math for a living. What I didn’t understand was the example. 6000 pesos (approximately $12.00) to wash a shirt? One shirt. Maybe that was just a hypothetical example. 4000 is a nice easy number for the mathematical computations. I requested the regular service.

Minutes later a guy arrived at my hotel room. I showed him a bag of laundry and asked him how much to wash the whole load. He explained that I would have to pay for each piece seperately. Really? I can’t just do a load of laundry. I didn’t even ask him the price at that point. If I have to pay to wash each pair of underwear individually I’m not sure I want to know the price. I refused the service and cordially sent the guy away, but I wanted to say, “You agree this is ridiculous right? How much for you to take it home and wash the load at your place?”

I looked up the prices.

Shirts: 4,000. Under Shirts: 2,200. Underwear: 2,000. Socks: 1,700. Pants: 3,500.

Four bucks to wash a pair of underwear? Are you kidding? I just washed and dried a whole load for $2.25. Let’s assume after the week I had 7 shirts, 7 pairs of boxers, 6 pairs of socks, 1 pair of shorts, and 2 pair of pants. That total for the hotel would be 52,000 Chilean pesos. Using the hotel’s conversion rate, it comes to 104 U.S. dollars for me to do one load of laundry. (And I wouldn’t even consider it a large load.) That’s almost what I spent for my first week of lodging.

We switched hotels to the Marriott, an even nicer hotel (with significantly more expensive laundry prices). Now, after a couple more days of trying to wear my clothes that were “less dirty,” I decided to take action.

I used the bathtub.

At the start and the end of this process the idea seemed reasonable. It was that moment in the middle, when I was in the bathroom of a 5-star hotel ringing my clothes out by hand wondering if they would dry before I left Chile, that the idea seemed questionable. I hung them out across the shower bar the best I could and hoped they would dry in the hotel. I questioned what the maid thought when she serviced our room, but… she’s probably seen the laundry prices too.

The clothes were moved to our board room (yeah, we had a meeting room in our business sweet) to finish drying. The next day, with a little assistance from a hair dryer, I put on clean clothes.