A Brief Primer On Customer Seating For Your Laundry

When laundry designers consider what type of seating they should install in a new laundry facility, too often they forget about the laundry customer’s needs.

Lets face it, there are really only four basic things that people do when the are at the laundry. Wash-em, dry-em and fold-em is what they do. In between they wait. Smart laundry owners provide some form of seating arrangement for the comfort of their customers during the waiting part of the equation.

There is almost no form of seating which has not been tried out in laundries, at one time or another. Old couches, car seats, kitchen chairs, folding chairs and benches. Today’s laundries mostly use formed plastic gang chairs and benches of metal, wood and plastic. There is little to recommend any of these for long term comfort, but they are alright for short term seating while waiting for the wash or dry cycles to be completed.

The design of the seating units in modern laundries has pretty much settled down to a few choices for operators to pick from. Most smaller laundries still use the gang of shell chairs. That is a set of three chairs that are bolted together on an iron framework. These are comparatively inexpensive, sturdy, easy to clean and fit in with the laundry decor since they are available in a variety of colors. They also offer an appearance which is not massive and work well proportionally in a small to medium sized laundry. They don’t take a lot of floor space.

Another choice is to use wooden benches that are constructed using metal frameworks and wooden slats fabricated in various lengths, usually with Formica glued onto the slats in the color of choice to match the decor. The frames are then attached. This is bit more expensive than plastic shell units, but does seem to better fit the newer and larger style of laundry.

Recently, complete metal benches are being fabricated for laundry seating. Custom made seating with the laundry’s name in the middle of the upper part of the bench back. Expensive by comparison to other seating choices, but boy do they look good.

The most important thing that you need to know about customer seating is that you may have a gang of three chairs, but it will really seat only two adults who are not either close friends or family members. That is because of personal space requirements felt by a majority of Americans. We each like and want “our own space”.

When you are considering doing a change to your laundry’s seating look, consider those customers who want you to provide them with their own space while the wait for the laundry loads to be finished.

Seats with a table between seating shells looks like a good solution. Benches long enough to allow separation between people will work as well. Four foot benches are not long enough to keep folks from sitting sort of cheek to cheek. Almost no one likes that, so keep your seating wide enough to allow your clientele that sense of privacy.

 

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