Laundry for the 21st Century
For those of you that are already Simply Laundry users, you know that our fast, efficient door-to-door dry cleaning and laundry delivery service has revolutionized the laundry process making it easy and quick to get all your cleaning done. But did you know that before in-home washers and dryers became commonplace, outsourcing laundry was actually the de facto means of saving time on laundry!
Everyone has seen a story or movie featuring people from the past scrubbing their laundry on metal boards by the river. For hundreds of years, this was how laundry was done – and in many third world countries, is how it is still done. Laundry was a communal affair done on a specific day and would typically take the entire day. It was tiring and time consuming. Washing machines didn’t enter the scene until the 1920s and were not ubiquitous in homes until the 1950s, so up until fairly recently, riverside scrubbing was how laundry got done!
When washing by the river using scrubbing boards was the best way to do laundry, most of the laundry was done by married women. To ease their burden, a ‘washerwoman’ could be hired who would handle the day-long task of laundry for a small fee. Additionally, a slew of commercial laundries sprung up, initially catering to businesses and single men, but eventually targeting housewives. These commercial launderers started to appear in the late 1880s and lasted until the washer/dryer craze hit North American homes.
Washers and dryers revolutionized the laundry process, especially for those who couldn’t afford washerwomen or to outsource, as it took laundry from a laborious, day-long process to something that could be managed in an afternoon. At the same time, manufacturing processes led to better materials and cheaper clothes, allowing people to expand their wardrobes and buy new and different fabrics. Additionally, people became more aware of the role played by cleanliness in their overall health and wanted to ensure that their clothes and linens stayed as clean and fresh as possible. While the process for washing laundry had shortened, there was now much more of it to do and new fabrics required different washing techniques such as hand-washing and dry cleaning. Laundry had come full circle and was still a time consuming task that could take a full day to complete for a family of four.
Enter 2015 and Simply Laundry – laundry revolution for the 21st century! Ironically, Simply Laundry did for 21st century laundry what commercial laundries did for 19th century laundry in much the same fashion. Commercial laundries of the late 1880s took a laborious, time-consuming task off the hands of consumers and turned a do-it-yourself task into a convenient (for the times) service. That’s exactly what Simply Laundry has done. Although washers and dryers make laundry much easier than washing in a riverside basin, the sheer breadth of variety in fabric and volume of 21st century clothing makes doing laundry an arduous and hours-long task. Factor in the inconvenience of working around dry cleaning hours and the time and energy put into laundry really hasn’t changed that much since scrubbing by the river. With Simply Laundry, you can save time, energy and even the environment by outsourcing your laundry needs to us. In the US, over 3 billion gallons of water could be saved each week if everyone used commercial washers over their in-home appliances.
Save time. Save money. Save the environment. It’s an easy choice. Revolutionize your laundry process today by signing up for Simply Laundry’s door-to-door laundry and dry cleaning delivery service!