CHICAGO — With the cost for a gallon of gas hitting record levels in recent weeks, businesses that offer laundry pickup and delivery are feeling the pinch.
Monday’s national average for a gallon of gas was $4.24, according to AAA. That’s 63 cents higher than a month earlier and $1.38 more than one year ago.
“How many once-in-a-lifetime events are we going to have before we realize that things in this industry are continually getting more expensive, not less expensive?” offers Mark Vlaskamp, co-owner and managing partner of The Folde, a laundry pickup and delivery service that relies on laundromats it owns in Houston and Austin, Texas.
“First, it was COVID, then winter freezes, then a chip shortage, then a labor shortage, then a labor strike with machine manufacturers, and now we’ve got a gas shortage — all causing an increase in input costs.”
The Folde adjusts its prices multiple times annually to account for rising costs, although not specifically for fuel. Vlaskamp believes delivery operators are doing themselves a disservice by pricing as a commodity and encourages them to raise their prices for this “hard, expensive work.”
In Long Beach, California, where Matt Simmons runs Super Suds Laundromat with brother Aaron, gas was recently $6 a gallon.
“We just raised our wash-and-fold delivery price by 10 cents a pound,” Simmons says. “A price increase of 5 cents per pound will add about $2 to each pickup and delivery order. We were considering a flat fee surcharge to cover rising fuel prices; however, wrapping fuel costs into the price per pound is easier to convey to the customer. Rising fuel costs is a good ‘excuse’ to raise your prices.”
In northwest Washington, near Colleen Unema’s Brio Laundry, the price of gas was $4.69 a gallon. She has maintained her normal pickup-and-delivery price structure but added a $5 fuel charge.
“We only offer a small radius on specific days, so our driver isn’t going all over the place,” she says of Brio’s service area. “In between, ‘out of service areas’ can bring it in or wait till we go there. (We) try to hit each neighborhood (twice) a week.”
Eric Smith, a professor of practice at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University in New Orleans, is an expert in energy markets and the oil and gas industry. He tells sister publication American Laundry News that the current high fuel costs, for the most part, are linked to the cost to transport the heavy crude oil used to make gasoline and diesel fuel.
Now, the Russia-Ukraine war is putting a squeeze on the amount of heavy crude available.
California, where the price of gas is at its highest, has its own issues, says Smith. They’re largely driven by factors such as drought and the fact that the state imports a lot of the crude it uses from places like Columbia and Ecuador.
Generally, Smith says he doesn’t think there will be a massive impact on U.S. fuel capacity but expects the country to see a ‘higher-for-longer’ price based on the uncertainty involved with Russia and Ukraine.
“Even if we were magically to have an armistice, a cease-fire, tomorrow, it will still take months to get everything balanced out again and get the crude flowing in the direction it was flowing before all of this happened.”
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Bruce Beggs at [email protected].