Several EVG readers told us about the pending closure, which they say is due to a rent increase that is more than the current ownership can manage.
Here's the closure notice, posted over the "We ❤️ NY Small Business" poster in the window between First Avenue and Second Avenue...
Patrons signed a petition urging the landlord to allow the business to stay. We stopped by multiple times, though we were always instructed to return later to speak with the owner. (The owner also did not respond to our call-back requests.)
"The laundromat has had a petition on its counter for a few weeks and got hundreds of signatures to try to keep it open, but the landlords are demanding an obscene rent hike," a patron told us. "All of us neighbors are so upset."
2 comments:
I can understand raising the rent to cover costs; but to deliberately force an entity out of business just so you can make a killing? That's infuriating. Businesses have always come and gone, and usually it was attributed to poor planning, bad management, or unforeseen circumstance. This seems to be a case of good old fashioned greed.
Just ask any restaurant or small business owner how difficult it is to exist with the ridiculously astronomical rents charged by these landlords, many of which are owned by corporate entities who could give a rat's ass about screwing hard working folks.
A lot of us rely upon these neighborhood laundromats since we don't have the "luxury" of having washer/dryers in our buildings or apartments. Over the years, schlepping further and further distances to find a place to do laundry has become the norm.
I went from just walking a few doors down the block, to walking around the corner to eventually hiking four blocks - all because the rents created impossible scenarios for small operations to survive.
Yet, we'll always have enough weed shops, coffee shops and burger joints to see us through.
This sucks.
I worry about the day when we lose a critical mass of laundromats.
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