The Coopers and Wash Daze Coin Laundries
Rock Spring residents Jerry and Carolyn Cooper set a goal for themselves – open three coin laundries within five years. “We’ve met the goal,” says Jerry Cooper, “just not quite in the way we originally planned.”
But before we get into that, the back story. Cooper was working for Synthetic Industries. When Synthetic was bought out by Shaw Industries, the nowentrepreneur started to feel his job wasn’t as stable as he’d like. Then Shaw bought Anderson Flooring, and Cooper found himself being sent to South Carolina to train prison inmates who were paid by Anderson to produce hand-scratched floors.
“I taught the inmates how to manage the computer end of the work – monitoring production and inventory, things like that,” says Cooper. “It’s just not what I wanted to do with my life.”
In the meantime, Cooper’s wife had been running a vending route filling snack machines and managing video games. The route had been growing, so Cooper decided to quit Shaw and expand the vending business further.
Fast forward several years. The vending business was doing great, but the Coopers were itching to try something else. But what? “If it takes a quarter and it’s a machine, we figured it was up our alley,” says Cooper. “So a coin laundry was natural.”
Cooper got with a distributor who helped him run the demographics on different areas – the data that would show whether a location was a wise choice. Fort Oglethorpe came out good.
“We sold part of our vending route, which was over 300 machines at that time, and started working on opening Wash Daze.”
While Cooper followed much of the advice he got, he also did some counterintuitive things with his laundry. “They told me to just make it plain, no frills, nothing people could mess up or steal. But that’s not what we wanted.”
Instead, Wash Daze is all bright colors. Carolyn loves monkeys, so you see them everywhere – monkey statues, stuffed monkeys hanging from the ceilings, monkeys painted on the floor and on the wall in the kids’ area. The walls are adorned with tin signs sporting John Wayne, the Three Stooges, Lucille Ball, and various funny or inspirational sayings.
“We have a TV with a remote so people can watch what they want,” says Cooper. “I was told not to put a remote in my place, but we’ve only gone through three of them in six years. That’s not bad.”
Customers will also find snack and soda machines, video games, free Wi-Fi and tables to sit and work at. The children’s play area has its own TV with a DVD player. The Coopers change the movie out from time to time, and children can start it over with the touch of a button. Or they can play with the toys provided in the area.
On the machine-end of the business, Cooper says people will find regular top-loading washers, front loaders and washers that hold up to six baskets of laundry. “We once put 27 pairs of jeans in one of the big ones and there was room for more,” he says. “They’re great for quilts and bed linens, too.” There are dryers in two sizes.
There’s a change machine, a machine that sells laundry aids, and Cooper says there will soon be an ATM available.
And still that’s not all. “Someone told me that if my coin laundry wasn’t safe for my grandmother to come to at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night, I needed to do something different,” says Cooper. To that end, Wash Daze is brightly lit and has surveillance cameras that monitor the premises at all times. Cooper has his phone number posted in the laundry, so customers can call if there’s a problem of any kind.
“We don’t have much trouble,” Cooper says, “but when there is an issue, the police are good about checking it out quickly.”
Automatic doors are also a major feature of the laundry. “It’s nice to have the door open for you when your arms are full of dirty clothes and you have a couple of kids in tow,” says Cooper.
Three years after opening their coin laundry in Fort Oglethorpe, the Coopers decided they were ready for laundry number two. They sold another part of their vending route and embarked on turning a car wash in Chickamauga into a laundry center.
“It wasn’t as easy as it sounds like it would be,” says Cooper. “We had to run a thousand feet of electrical wire and all the water lines had to run through the ceiling.”
The Chickamauga Wash Daze has most of the amenities of its older sister, including surveillance. “We couldn’t manage the automatic door there,” says Cooper. “They’re really expensive.”
Cooper says it also took longer for the Chickamauga location to develop a customer base. “That’s to be expected in more rural areas,” he says. “But it’s going strong now.”
The original goal for the Coopers was three coin laundries in five years. “Sometimes you have to think outside the box,” says Cooper. “On my vending route, I discovered that there were hotels and motels and even small apartment complexes that had no laundry facilities. I started to suggest to owners that I put in machines and maintain them.”
The Coopers now have small coin laundries – sometimes just one or two washers and dryers – in 25 locations throughout Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. “Most of them are strictly for the guests or tenants where we put them in,” says Cooper, “but there’s one motel owner who lets anyone use them.”
Cooper’s advice for other aspiring business owners: “They say if you do what you love, it’s not work. We work 75-80 hours a week, but we love it. And don’t think you can just quit your regular job and earn a living at your new endeavor. It takes time to build up a business. We still have part of our vending route.”
Keep an eye out for Wash Daze at public events. Their mascot, Dazey the Monkey, shows up at festivals and fairs and at customer appreciation days at the two local coin laundries.
“We really do have great customers,” says Cooper. “On our cameras, we’re more likely to see someone using the brooms and dust pans we leave out to help clean things up than we are to see any problem.”