Cash In, One Load at a Time Whether you're looking to break free from the nine-to-five grind or just want to make a little extra money on the side, a coin-operated laundry could be your ticket to financial independence. With more people living in condos and apartments, laundromats are more profitable than ever, and you can shape the business to match your tastes, interests and imagination. This low-maintenance, highly lucrative business could earn...

"In Steam Laundries, Arwen Mohun traces the industry's development from the first commercial laundries in the 1840s to their decline in the 1950s. That trajectory, she argues, took shape within the constraints of what was technologically possible and culturally acceptable. Rising standards of cleanliness, new kinds of machinery, and an increasingly polluted urban environment provided the context for the industry's emergence. The shortcomings of applying...

Set in Detroit in the late thirties and early forties, Waiting for the News tells of a man driven by an almost religious fanaticism about trade unionism. Jake Gottlieb, a laundry driver with grand designs, spins seditious dreams of a strike against all laundry companies, beginning with his own. The world he takes on is tough and nasty. Hired fists are always ready to smash the heads of stubborn troublemakers, fists that are no less brutal because...