There is a laundromat two blocks from you with fluorescent lights, a television playing something nobody is watching, and a chair with a crack in it.
It might be worth more than the restaurant next door.
Not in a metaphorical way. In the way where someone would pay seven figures for it, and the restaurant owner is quietly losing money while working ninety hours a week.
That comparison is the whole story, so hold it in your head.
The restaurant has food that spoils, a menu that must be invented, staff on every shift, a health inspection, reviews that can destroy it overnight, and a failure rate that is genuinely brutal.
The laundromat has machines.
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No inventory. No menu. No perishables. No reviews that matter. Frequently no employee on site at all. Open at 6am on a Sunday with nobody there.
And a customer base that has no alternative, because they do not own a washing machine and are not going to buy one this month.
So why is everybody not doing this?
Because there is a catch, and it is hiding in the utility bill.