By Timothy Oommen, Owner — Laundini Laundromat | laundinilaundromat.com
A laundromat is a strange place to learn about a city.
It’s not a restaurant where people linger and talk. It’s not a barbershop with its own social ecosystem. It’s a utilitarian space — machines, fluorescent light, the smell of detergent — where people come to solve a problem and leave. Most of the time nobody says much. Most of the time people are on their phones or staring at a dryer like it owes them something.
And yet. In a year of running Laundini — building it, operating it, driving the van, washing the loads, talking to customers across four locations from Evanston to Bucktown to Skokie to Wheeling — I have learned more about this city than I learned in the three years before it combined.
Here is some of what I know now that I didn’t know then.
Chicago Takes Care of Its Own — On Its Own Terms
I am not originally from Chicago. I came here for school, stayed for the opportunities, and built a business here because this is where I was and where the work was.
What I didn’t fully understand until I started operating a service business across multiple neighborhoods is that Chicago is not one city. It is a collection of communities with distinct identities, distinct loyalties, and distinct ways of deciding who to trust.
Evanston trusts you differently than Bucktown. Bucktown trusts you differently than Skokie. Skokie trusts you differently than Wheeling. The trust in each place is real and available — but you have to earn it in the specific way each community offers it. Show up consistently. Be honest. Do the work. Don’t disappear when something goes wrong.
The neighborhoods that have given us the most loyal customers are the ones where we showed up the most — physically, operationally, in terms of actual presence and reliability. Chicago rewards consistency in a way that shortcuts cannot replicate.
The City Runs on People Nobody Sees
A year of pickup and delivery has shown me, concretely and repeatedly, the invisible infrastructure of working people who keep this city functioning.
The nurses finishing night shifts at 7am who answer the door still in scrubs. The restaurant workers whose laundry smells like a kitchen because they spent ten hours in one. The building maintenance workers, the home health aides, the people working double shifts in jobs that require clean uniforms and have no time to ensure clean uniforms. The parents managing households that generate laundry faster than anyone could reasonably keep up with.
These are not peripheral people. They are the operational core of the city. They keep things running in the most direct, physical sense. And they are chronically underserved by the kinds of services that make life manageable — not because the services don’t exist, but because the services aren’t designed around the reality of their schedules, their incomes, and their constraints.
Building Laundini to work for these people specifically — fair pricing, flexible scheduling, free delivery, a driver who shows up at your door and hands it directly to you — was partly a business decision and partly something else. A response to what I saw when I paid attention.
Small Business Is Lonelier Than Anyone Tells You
I have met more small business owners in the last year than in my entire life before it. Restaurants, dry cleaners, retail shops, service businesses of every kind. And the thing I’ve noticed, talking to these people honestly rather than politely, is that almost all of them are carrying something heavy that they don’t show publicly.
The gap between how a small business looks from the outside and what it feels like from the inside is significant. From the outside: a functioning operation, a brand, a product or service that works. From the inside: a constant negotiation between what needs to happen and what the resources currently allow, punctuated by problems that arrive faster than solutions.
I wrote about my hardest year elsewhere on this blog. What I want to say here is that finding other business owners who were honest about their own hard years — Tony with his bars, the restaurant owner down the block, the dry cleaner two streets over who’s been there for twenty years and has seen everything — made a difference that I didn’t expect. Solidarity among people doing hard things is underrated. Chicago has a lot of people doing hard things. They’re worth finding.
The South Side Is a Different City
I bought a second laundromat on the South Side, in South Shore, on 75th Street. I don’t talk about it as much as I should because it has presented challenges I’m still working through and I’m not ready to write the full story yet.
But what I can say is that operating in South Shore has shown me a Chicago that Evanston doesn’t show you. Different needs, different rhythms, different history, different relationship with services and institutions. The South Side is not a problem to be solved. It is a community with its own depth and its own logic that takes time and genuine presence to understand.
I’m still learning it. I expect to be learning it for years. That’s the right pace.
The Van Is Where I Think Best
I didn’t expect this one.
I have done some of my clearest thinking behind the wheel of the Laundini delivery van, running routes across Cook County. Something about the motion, the specific task, the city moving past the window — it creates a mental space that a desk doesn’t.
Some of the best decisions I’ve made about this business happened in the van. Some of the clearest perspective I’ve found on problems that seemed unsolvable in the office became manageable somewhere on the Evanston stretch of Ridge Avenue at 6am.
I don’t know what this means exactly. But I notice it consistently enough that I think it’s real. There is something about physically being in the city — moving through it, seeing it at different hours, in different weather, in different neighborhoods — that connects you to it in a way that running an operation from behind a screen cannot replicate.
The van is not just a delivery vehicle. It is, unexpectedly, part of how I run this company.
Gratitude Is a Business Strategy
This sounds like something you’d read on a motivational poster and dismiss. Hear me out.
In the last year I have been helped by people who had no obligation to help me. The friend of a friend who became a communications partner. The UIC batchmate who handles our finances with more precision than I could ever manage myself. The restaurant owner who said yes after I kept showing up. The customers who booked a second time before I had any right to expect them to.
None of these people owed me anything. They chose to show up. And the businesses and relationships that have given me the most this year are the ones where I acknowledged that explicitly rather than treating support as something I was simply entitled to because I was working hard.
Gratitude expressed genuinely changes how people engage with you and what they’re willing to do for you. This is not manipulation — it’s honesty. People who feel genuinely seen and appreciated show up differently than people who feel like inputs in someone else’s operation.
I’m still learning how to do this consistently. But I know it matters.
What I Would Tell Myself a Year Ago
Do fewer things. Finish them properly before you start the next one.
The contractors will disappoint you. Not all of them, but enough of them. Verify everything. Put it in writing. Test the work before you pay for it.
The machines will break on the worst possible days. Have a plan. Have a backup plan. Have a person you can call at 7am who will pick up.
The customers who seem like they might be difficult usually are. The customers who seem solid usually are. Trust your instincts faster.
The people who show up repeatedly and quietly — the regulars, the team members who just do the work without drama, the business partners who do what they say — are more valuable than any single dramatic win. Protect those relationships. Invest in them.
And finally: the hard months are not evidence that the thing was a mistake. They are the thing. The difficulty is not separate from building something worth having — it is what building something worth having feels like from the inside. You don’t find out what you’re made of in the easy periods.
What Comes Next
The South Shore location is a project I’m committed to completing properly. The senior living partnership across from Emerson Street is in progress. The university discount program is expanding. The 100 free loads commitment is real and in motion.
The blog you’re reading is, I hope, the beginning of a longer conversation — with customers, with the community, with anyone who finds Laundini and wants to know who’s actually behind it and what we actually stand for.
Year two starts now. I’m more clear-eyed than I was a year ago, more grounded, and more committed than ever to building something in this city that lasts.
Thank you for being part of it. Genuinely.
Book your pickup at laundinilaundromat.com. All of Cook County, $1.50/lb, free delivery, 24-hour turnaround. If you’ve been with us since the beginning — thank you. If you’re just finding us — welcome. Either way, we’re glad you’re here.
Timothy Oommen is the founder and owner of Laundini Laundromat, with locations in Evanston, Bucktown, Skokie, and Wheeling, IL.