Laundromat users must physically guard clothes for 60-90 min or risk theft

A typical laundromat visit requires 30-45 minutes for washing and 30-45 minutes for drying, during which the customer must either sit and wait or risk having their clothes stolen or removed from the machine by another patron. Leaving and returning is impractical because cycle end times are imprecise and machines have no notification system. For a single parent with children, this means 60-90 minutes of dead time in a facility with no childcare, limited seating, and often no Wi-Fi, repeated 1-2 times per week. That's 6-12 hours per month of captive unproductive time that wealthier households with in-unit laundry simply don't experience. This is a regressive time tax on the working poor. It persists because laundromat operators have no incentive to add cycle-complete notifications, machine-lock features, or secure pickup windows, since dwell time increases ancillary revenue from vending machines and the customer has no alternative.