Lazy Silicon Valley Gets Fourth On-Demand Laundry Startup
The marketplace of ideas! Survival of the fittest... company! Clash of corporations, let the best business reap all! San Francisco's latest attempt to smother a trivial problem with an overabundance of technology is here: Prim, another techie service for idle people who don't like laundry.
TechCrunch's intrepid Josh Constine, in a nearly thousand-word writeup of Prim, has a dose of fabric-softening reality for you:
You can call it a first-world problem. Or you can say it distracts people from their passions and contributions to the world. Either way, laundry is a chore, and new Y Combinator startup Prim wants to do it for you. You can schedule Prim online to come to your place, pick up your laundry, have it washed and folded at a top-notch laundromat, and deliver it back to you. $25 for a bag. It’s that easy.
It's that easy to be a 21st century manchild and pay $25 to have someone come to your house—or, seriously, come into your house with a copy of your keys—to pick up your laundry. Do you know how many quarters $25 can get you? Four times that number of dollars, in quarters. That is many loads of laundry. Or, just walk (not Uber) your dirty hoodies to the laundromat and pay half that much for someone else to do it—honest, old fashioned sloth.
If you think this idea is silly, you're silly:
In SF, Prim will have to battle LaundryLocker where you drop your clothes in a public locker, and delivery services like Sfwash (where you pay by the pound), Sudzee (which requires special lockable bags), and some other local services.
There's an entire cottage industry of geeks who don't want to touch their own soiled garments. And why should they? It's cleaning up after yourself that's keeping our American economy in the shitter, Constine explains:
Prim lets you concentrate on what you love to do, what you’re responsible for, or how you contribute to the universe. I’m decent at writing, terrible at laundry, and busy. Spending a ton of time washing and folding is just inefficient for me. I feel better stimulating the economy and letting someone good at laundry do their thing.
This is why Prim got a spot among other elite startups at Y Combinator, a highly exclusive investment incubator. The division of labor. Let the economy-stimulators at TechCrunch write panegyrics to Facebook, and let "someone good at laundry" (poor, didn't go to Stanford, etc.) handle the rest. The divine order. Let the launderers do the laundry, the randoms do some beta testing,