OUR GOAL
Main Street Washateria’s main goal is to provide each guest with the best possible experience we can. We do this through constant upkeep and cleaning of your facilities. kind, courteous, knowledgeable, and helpful employees. And, most importantly, we are serious about the cleanliness of your machines. All washers have a disinfectant cycle constantly running through them to ensure your health and safety. Though the laundry is important to us, our guests are much more important, and we have made it clear that your comfort is important. In our guest lounge area, we have invested the critical time it takes to make sure this area is comfortable, functional, and clean. The guest lounge has wi-fi, a large screen TV, couches, chairs, tables, charging stations and more. We also provide vending machines with the snacks and drinks we all want.
We strive to give our guests a place not only for your laundry, but to also relax and take a break while our Speed Queen machines are hard at work.
OUR HISTORY
This here is a rather interesting set of circumstances and eventually takes me back to the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. But first, I must set the picture.
In 2021 my wife and I began looking to change things up a little bit. I had been retired for a year at this point and I needed something to do to occupy my time. We traveled a bit, hung out with friends and overall, we had a great time. However, we needed something more to do. Retirement was good, but we just weren’t ready for the ole’ rocking chair, just yet.
So, we began looking for a business to either buy or establish ourselves. After a poor experience at a local laundromat, we ultimately decided to start our own laundromat with a wash/dry/fold service. We were well into our due diligence phase and working to secure a great location here in Cedar City, Utah, when I learned my grandparents owned a laundromat in Brownfield, Texas. Not only did I learn about their laundromat, but I learned my great-grandparents owned one too. They too were in Brownfield, Texas and were only a short distance from my grandparents’.
Okay, so this was just a little weird to me, but fascinating at the same time. How is it that out of all the businesses we considered, we settled on a laundromat, an industry my grandparents and great-grandparents were involved in so many years ago. After some research, I found that the laundromat my grandparents owned doubled as their home as well. My grandparents, mom and two uncles lived here and spent a lot of time running around the laundromat. My grandparents established this business sometime around 1952, a short seven years after the war.
In the front half of the building, there was a wash area with approximately eight washers. When the ladies would pull up to the laundromat with their laundry, my grandfather would go out and carry in their metal tubs full of clothes. They washed their clothing in machines that you had to use a large wooden stick to push the clothing around with, and when it came time to wring them out, they would run the clothes through a machine with rollers. These rollers would squeeze the water out of the clothes and prep them to be hung on a clothesline. Sounds like a lot of work to me, but hey, back then, all our families (yours and mine) had to work hard. Not that we don’t now, it was just a different type of grit back then. My uncle Jack told me after the laundromat would close, he would take those wooden sticks, which were about 18” long and run them through the machine that wrang the water out of the clothes. There was such great speed to the rollers, it would shoot the wooden stick across the room. He said it was a lot of fun to do. Just not sure my grandparents knew what he was up to. After talking to my mom, Sandra, she told me this is where she learned to put peanuts in her cokes. She said people would come into the laundromat and buy her a coke. Someone then showed her how putting peanuts in the coke made the coke taste better. I’ll just believe her, because there is no way I’m doing that.
I can share with you where the name Main Street Washateria came from. Washateria is a south Texan name for laundromat, and to honor my grandparents, my wife and I settled on combining the term “Washateria” with something that represented Cedar City. So, we combined Main Street and Washateria to form our business name “Main Street Washateria”.
I’m still trying to find out more about both my grandparents and great-grandparents’ laundromats and when I do, I’ll be sure to share it with you. Until then, I will take what little information I have learned and use it to make them all proud of us.