The Worst Thing About the Pandemic

I know, I know. In the midst of a lethal pandemic where scores of Covid-19 patients are struggling for their lives, it seems pathetically small of me to focus on something like how I can’t wash my clothes using my apartment building’s coin-operated machines. But it isn’t just about staying springtime fresh. In the immortal words of Wash Hogwallop, finding ways to do your laundry, weigh yourself, or have Zoltar tell your fortune have “Up ‘an R-U-N O-F-F-T.” Thank God, I gave up using cigarette vending machines in 1976.

All of the hoo-ha started during the summer of 2020 with the closure of retailers, gas stations, and restaurants. Apparently, many of their customers still paid for goods and services with cash. Spare change, to be exact. As the pandemic escalated, struggling establishments began posting signs near their cash registers, “Please pay with credit cards or exact change.”

A June 11, 2020 Federal Reserve news release confirmed that coin deposits to the Fed (which supplies commercial banks) have drastically declined. At the same time, the U.S. Mint decreased coin production. According to the release, “Although the Federal Reserve is confident that the coin inventory issues will resolve once the economy opens more broadly and the coin supply chain returns to normal circulation patterns, we recognize that these measures alone will not be enough to resolve near-term issues.”

Meanwhile, I still couldn’t do my laundry.

But apart from my dependency on gumball machines, I’ve never been a cash kind of guy. Even before there were debit cards, I’d routinely write checks for $0.29 at convenience stores and worry about balancing my checking account later. I never did.

So, I’ve come up with a creative plan to deal with the national quarter shortage, relieving me of the pressure from doing my

laundry.

The first thing I tried was building a relationship with a bank. But, in order to set up a new account, the bank demanded that I keep a minimum of $150 balance in my checking account, so that wouldn’t work. And even if I did, you still can’t walk up to a bank teller and ask for a roll of quarters. They don’t do that anymore.

You can use ATM’s, or shop at places like Walmart that offer cashback options. But that still presents a problem: they only dispense cash in increments of $20.00 or more, and since Walmart refuses to change $20 bills into $10 bills or smaller, you still have to find creative ways to get around the hurdle by looking for inexpensive items to buy that cost less than fifty cents using $20 bills. Things like L’Oven Hot Dog Buns, two-liter bottles of Diet Coke, or Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. I don’t usually use any of those products, but sometimes you do what you have to do. It entails standing at the register, calculating on your iPhone how much additional sales tax will be tacked onto your purchase, and determining whether or not the change will include quarters.

Buying individual Chapsticks works the best for me. Where I shop, Chapsticks cost $1.00 each. Including sales tax, each one costs $1.08. That means I’ll get $0.92 in change: three quarters, one dime, a nickel, and two pennies, so I’ll usually go through the process five or six times until I have enough for a large load of laundry. Besides, I can always use more Chapstick.

If none of those work, you can always circle through fast-food drive-up windows. After doing extensive online research, I found the following items at Wendy’s that met my criteria:

• Wendy’s Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxe ($1.89)
• Small Frosty ($0.99)
• Trumoo 1% Low-Fat Chocolate Milk for $1.29

I could have also bought a healthier Caesar Side Salad for $1.49, but what would be the point of that? If I looped through the drive-up window five or six times, I’d accumulate enough quarters to do a week’s laundry. Maybe two.

By and large, laundromats are still the best places to find quarters. That’s assuming they’re coin-operated. These days, a lot of laundromats have converted to cashless operations. You have to buy one of their proprietary purchase cards using a debit or credit card and load it with their over-inflated value. They’re usually more expensive than good old-fashioned coin laundries and still don’t solve the challenge of my using the coin-operated machines in my apartment complex. So, that won’t work.

What does work is finding a coin laundry with coin dispensers with no management on-site to catch you at your game. I often hit the laundromats late at night, five minutes before they close, donning costumes and disguises leftover from Halloween. When that works, I’ll pump at least $200 through the changer, until I have enough quarters to use the machines in my complex for a year.

I suppose I could always cave in and go with the inevitable: use the newfangled card-operating laundromats, or heaven forbid, buy my own machines. But where would be the adventure in that? Until then, it’s been more fun skulking around under the cloak of darkness, wearing inventive disguises, wondering when and if I was going to get busted for illegal use of a laundromat change machine.

And, at least I’ll be able to do my laundry.