'Progress' at the Laundromat

 Whether we want to admit it or not, we are all speculators on inflation.  That is true regardless of whether you talk or think about inflation.  Rather than try to take on the issue in global or abstract terms, I prefer to illustrate inflation with something from everyday life.  Let's consider the place that RVers "love" the most, the laundromat.

Reprogramming the machines to take more quarters is labor-intensive and cumbersome.  Surely they need to come up with something better.  This is what I saw recently:

Dollar coins?  Don't think I've ever seen one.  But the machines didn't take dollar coins directly.  You had to put them into the machine on the left in order to generate the quarters that the machines accepted.  Perhaps they were getting ready to transition the machines to dollar coins.  At any rate, this seems like a clumsy way to implement the inflation program.

Here is a better way:

They have transitioned half of the machines to take credit cards.  I see vast potential to this method.  For one thing they can avoid showing the price on the machines, and have you download a free app to your smartphone.  Then you can get on the app and fumble around with the menu which will eventually reveal the price after you have selected the cycle, temperature, heavy-soil, etc.

Consider how easy it will be to raise the price at will, and disguise it.  Perhaps they will go to the subscription business model: customers will pay $19.99 per month to do laundry once or twice a month.  If you need to do it more often you can sign up for "Platinum Plan", which is ON SALE right now.  (Hurry, offer ends soon!)  

Chalk up the laundromats as one more sector of the economy gobbled up by the financial industry.  Perhaps some of the financial companies (like Black Rock) will wakeup and start buying many of the mom-and-pop laundromats across the country.

Will the customers go along with the inflation program?  I'll bet they will.  Complacency is so automatic with most consumers -- they are not about to become cranks, troublemakers, gadflies, or negative thinkers and resist the inflation program.

The Federal Reserve won't have the balls to do anything real about inflation.  . Maybe it couldn't, even if it wanted to.  There are powerful forces that are pro-inflation.  Young people have decades of persistent inflation to look forward to.  They need to develop a radical contempt for buying anything.  They need to take pride in being innovative and substitute something cheaper for the product that has just gone up.